U of I's transportation engineers leading mobility efforts

7/21/2021 Emily Jankauski

Illinois Center for Transportation is proud to announce seven new transportation research projects.

UIUC is on the cusp of developing a blueprint for autonomous vehicle and other similar technology integration in Illinois thanks to Jayme and crew’s research effort.

R27-228: Illinois, a leader in Mobility 4.0 and beyond

With connected and autonomous vehicles and similar technology advancing rapidly, ICT and Illinois Department of Transportation are partnering together to establish a strategy to simplify multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder efforts.

Angeli Jayme, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering postdoctoral research associate, leads this effort alongside Imad Al-Qadi, UIUC Bliss Professor of Engineering and ICT director; Breton Johnson, senior associate director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center; Jerry Quandt, executive director of the Illinois Autonomous Vehicles Association; and Hani Mahmassani, William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and NUTC director.

The Illinois Department of Transportation-sponsored project establishes a blueprint for streamlining this futuristic technology and leveraging resources to better prepare the transportation agency and other Illinois municipality transportation agencies.

What’s the best way to accomplish this?

According to Jayme and team, it’s Mobility 4.0, “a connected and digitized, multimodal, autonomous system-of-systems,” she said.

Together the Illinois team will review current efforts to integrate connected and autonomous vehicles/transportation into U.S. mobility networks, especially those relevant to the needs of our state.

They will identify current and future resources Illinois has available to leverage and prepare the state for the incorporation of such futuristic technology.

Efforts will wrap up by October 2022.

Autonomous and connected vehicles are just around the corner in Illinois, and preparing for their integration with traditional vehicles and infrastructure is no easy task. U of I researchers plan to tackle this effort by developing an integration plan.

Planning for emerging mobility: Testing and deployment in Illinois

UIUC has a drive to meet mobility demands with its Smart Transportation Infrastructure Initiative — a consortium of government, academic, and industry partners developing and researching transportation infrastructure and capacities necessary for the next generation of mobility.

Perhaps its biggest ambition is building a high-speed autonomous and connected vehicle track known as the Illinois Autonomous and Connected Track.

The Illinois Department of Transportation-sponsored project is led by Al-Qadi alongside Ria Kontou, UIUC CEE assistant professor; Lewis Lehe, UIUC CEE assistant professor; Yanfeng Ouyang, UIUC CEE professor; Ghassan Chehab, ICT senior research scientist; and Noah Isserman, UIUC Gies College of Business visiting assistant professor of business administration.

Here researchers will create a 5G integration plan as well as an optimized 5G feasibility study. These efforts will help the development and management of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. The study has also developed the expected economic impact of I-ACT.

In addition, electrification efforts will provide and optimize electric vehicle charging options as well as energy harvesting.

Charging stations will soon be part of our everyday lives, likely popping up at more and more fueling stations to reach the U.S. Climate Alliance’s goal of cutting 50 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.

R27-236: Electric vehicle charging infrastructure strategic planning for the state of Illinois: Highway electrification

The U.S. Climate Alliance set a goal of 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. To make that happen, the U.S. aims to get more electric vehicles on the road.

But before we shift to powering up, there’s a lot to consider, like providing access to charging stations.

That’s a job for Ria Kontou, UIUC CEE assistant professor, who leads this IDOT-sponsored project. Here Kontou will estimate electric vehicle adoption levels needed to meet the U.S. Climate Alliance’s goals for the state of Illinois.

She’ll partner with IDOT to coordinate a statewide electric vehicle infrastructure committee to identify priorities to meet the alliance’s goalposts. Kontou aims to provide a blueprint for policymakers so they can move quickly in developing the changes necessary to implement these sustainable efforts.

Automated vehicles for all

The $7 million project, awarded by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Automated Driving System Demonstration Grants, puts autonomous cars on rural roads.

Alireza Talebpour, UIUC assistant professor, leads the project alongside fellow researchers Samer Hamdar, a George Washington University School of Engineering & Applied Science associate professor, and Francis Assadian, a University of California Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professor.

Five autonomous vehicles will be put to the test on rural roads in and around College Station, Texas; Northern Virginia; Rantoul, Illinois; and Washington, D.C.

The project is expected to reach completion by 2025.

Pedestrians cross an intersection as a connected and autonomous vehicle senses the pedestrians and stops for them to pass. Talebpour believes such transit will not only improve the lives of millions, but it will also be a much safer form of travel in the future.

Third-generation simulation data

Talebpour also leads a $430,000, Federal Highway Administration-sponsored effort exploring the impacts of automated driving systems on human behavior.

The U of I assistant professor is teaming up with Mahmassani and Hamdar in the data collection project.

To do so, helicopters will fly over the autonomous cars and collect data from them. Simultaneously those autonomous vehicles will observe their impact on human behavior. The effort takes place in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Two types of data collection will occur — one with the autonomous vehicles’ sensors on full display and the other hiding them.

“We want to know if you put an autonomous car on a highway or a street how that (could) change the way people behave,” Talebpour said. “Would that change people’s driving behavior or walking behavior or biking behavior?”

Talebpour anticipates the project’s achievement will be the “most comprehensive” data set from autonomous cars, benefiting the entire transportation industry.

This effort is expected to reach completion by January 2023.

UIUC researchers hope to be able to put plastic waste materials to good use, converting 3 million tons of the annual 26 million tons of waste into a pavement binding agent, like bitumen, to aid in pavement replacement efforts.

Non-recyclable plastics to pavements, P2P

Major changes are underway in the world of pavement replacement. Here researchers are substituting pavement binding materials like bitumen out for plastic waste materials.

Al-Qadi leads this effort alongside Sriraam Chandrasekaran, lead research engineer of the Illinois Sustainability Technology Center.

More than 26 million tons of plastics go to U.S. landfills each year, according to the researchers. The recycled effort would be a huge step towards sustainability in the transportation industry, putting more than 3 million tons of that plastic waste to work in our pavements.

Together the two will develop compatibility and blending methods for substituting bitumen with plastic waste. They will also investigate the various types of plastic to consider for the mixture.

Researchers will also consider storage options for the plastic waste once it’s been modified as a binding agent. The modified plastic will undergo chemical and rheological — the way a material responds to applied stress — characterization.

The team will also quantify the substituted bitumen’s environmental benefits throughout the pavement’s life cycle by using life-cycle assessments.

The duo hopes to put plastic waste to good use and create a sustainable product by reducing the carbon footprint and lessening transportation loads to landfills.

The research effort is anticipated to reach completion in December 2022.

UIUC researchers are that much closer to providing a pavement prediction model using combined field data from various sections of airfields.

Building machine-learning-based prediction models for computationally efficient airfield pavement analysis

Al-Qadi also leads the Federal Aviation Administration-sponsored effort. He aims to develop a more generalized pavement prediction model by combining field data from various sections of airfields.

How so? Al-Qadi will use the FAA-developed accelerated pavement testing instrument response data to create prediction models.

The project will wrap up by September 2022.