Personal Rapid Transportation (PRT) Simulator


Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is an electric-powered, autonomous transportation system. The PRT emulates a car’s individual, modular architecture, and avoids the pitfalls of bus and rail mass transit without requiring fuel cells or advanced battery technology.  In this design, lightweight two- to four- passenger vehicles run along an elevated guideway, which can be built over existing roads. Traffic is managed by a control system that functions much like packet routing over the Internet (with non-destructive arbitration).


We intend to build two simulators, one to study the effects of the PRT on traffic congestion and the other on energy use (at UC Berkeley). The first simulator will model traffic patterns to test network design and estimate congestion. It will also be used to validate control algorithms generated both from within this project and by external PRT developers. Similarly, the energy simulator will be used to estimate the impact of PRT on energy requirements and CO2 emissions.


Local governments can use these tools to evaluate potential PRT designs while helping to benchmark the goals mandated by AB32. Using these two simulators to demonstrate system viability, the hope is to establish a full center and bring PRT to California as the next generation of transportation system.


PRT has the potential to drastically reduce emissions without reliance on fuel cells or advanced batteries.  Each mile of installed PRT on interstate highways would offset an estimated 6,000 metric tons of CO2 and 350 metric tons of CO2 for arterials (for context, consider that public transit in the US offsets 6.9m metric tons of CO2 per year). By comparison, building only 500 miles of PRT on interstates (or 13,000 miles of PRT on arterials and collector roads) would equal the savings of the entire public transit system, and at a fraction of the cost.


Traffic congestion, which drains untold hours of productivity from the workforce, would be considerably reduced with the deployment of PRT. This would be true both for the commuters using PRT as well as the non-commuters remaining on the roadways. A single elevated guideway would replace three lanes of traffic by safely increasing potential speed, reducing the following distance, and automating traffic control.


Most importantly, as PRT maintains traffic separation by design, transportation safety would be greatly increased by reducing the chance of collision between cars/pedestrians/bicycles. For example, the PRT system in Morgantown, West Virginia, has seen zero fatalities in nearly thirty years of operation. When compared with the annual fatality rate for automobiles, PRT presents a drastic improvement.


Finally, PRT would increase overall productivity by cutting travel time and enabling drivers to work during their commute. The effect is even more dramatic when one factors in the time and cost it takes to park a commuter vehicle. Without these drains on their time, energy, and money, PRT commuters would be far more productive than their car-bound colleagues.


Funded by Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).




multimedia


  1. photos and images



Publications


  1. (1)PRTSIM - a simulator for Personal Rapid Transit. Code, wiki, and installation files.


People


  1. Gabriel Elkaim, Associate Professor, Computer Engineering, UCSC, 831.459.3054

  2. Dan Homerick, Masters Student (graduated), CS UCSC, now at 2D3 Sensing.

PRT Simulator