Program on Advanced Technology for the Highway: vehicle/highway research and development

The program is focused on three fields of technology: navigation, automatic control of vehicles, and noncontact electrification. The authors report on progress in the area of vehicle navigation and address briefly the other two areas of research. The goals, time frames, and technical approach being employed in the navigation tasks are presented. The navigation component of the work aims at improving system performance efficiency by accumulation and dissemination of information so as to improve on the utilization of available network resources. This is achieved by alternative routeings of vehicles, incident detection and avoidance, and the routeing and scheduling of commercial and institutional vehicle fleets, and, ultimately, improved time and route planning of trips. Navigation research is focused on the urban congestion problem.<>