Highlight
Recent IGERT Fellow Douglas Lundquist wins two awards
Achievement/Results
Research by Dr. Aris Ouksel and recent University of Illinois at Chicago IGERT trainee Douglas Lundquist, on “Market-based Cap-and-Trade Policies for Resource Management in Vehicular Networks and Other Applications,” is the first of its kind. They have developed a novel dynamic cap-and-trade decentralized system that monitors energy resource usage in vehicular environments, including electric and certain plug-in hybrid cars, and allows drivers to transparently negotiate their resource usage in real time with other vehicles in an energy information cloud managed through brokers. Drs. Ouksel and Lundquist have been named winners of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2011 Research and Innovative Technology Administration Connected Vehicle Technology Challenge for this work which supported by the National Science Foundation.
The competition sought ideas for using wireless technology that enables vehicles to communicate with each other. The winning ideas may be incorporated into technology to improve vehicle safety and transportation operations. Their proposal was to create a market for the exchange of pollution credits. This study combines innovative computing, economics, and networking approaches for on-the-fly competitive cap-and-trade vehicle energy resource management via a mobile network platform. Through the use of game theoretics and mobile computing they created a cap and trade market exchange system called VCAT (Vehicular Cap-And-Trade) which provides incentives related to pollution and congestion pricing.
Ouksel and Lundquist are also co-PIs on a $116,921 award from the UIC College of Business Administration for a two-year interdisciplinary research program. They will investigate a set of cap-and-trade methods related to transportation. The considered domains include traffic congestion, pollution emissions, energy consumption, and ride-sharing. The goal is supporting transportation sustainability through a hierarchical ad hoc trading network.
The research program will include game-theoretic and simulation models. Specific research areas include: economic models for competitive energy research allocation; information discovery and dissemination protocols in ad hoc networks; resource measurement through data sampling; usage prediction through data mining; and decentralized transaction management.
Address Goals
The invention represents a novel scientific approach towards sustainability, by reducing the environmental impact of vehicles through cap-and-trade market mechanisms.
