Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems and Beyond: A Vision of Future Road Vehicle Management

This paper presents a technical vision for future individual traffic. It deals with two different objectives: passenger cars or motorcycles as battery-driven electric vehicles (EVs) and traffic congestion avoidance. On the technical background of our own work we will explain how power supply for recharging the batteries will have to be organized in a distributed fashion, in particular under the assumption that the power is provided through renewable sources such as from wind turbines and solar panels (which are widely dispersed themselves). We will argue that while the unpredictability of local or regional customers in traditional power grid management creates already major problems for network stability (thus for providing the reserve energy needed) these will be greatly amplified by introducing EVs on a large scale, and by integrating renewable energy into the existing power management. In our DEZENT project we have defined and broadly pursued a distributed bottom-up approach for negotiating demand and supply under such circumstances, in an adequate architecture where demand and supply will be negotiated by software agents within 0.5 sec intervals while at the same time the grid stability is guaranteed. Since EVs themselves constitute relevant sources of reserve energy when coming up in large numbers they could be a core instrument for minimizing the stability problem.- Under this innovative perspective we will also discuss a novel distributed algorithm (BeeJamA) based on Swarm Intelligence where the EVs receive directions in due time, in a highly dynamic way before reaching each road intersection. In the absence of global information congestions are avoided and at the same time the travel times of all drivers are "homogenized". Combined with the transition into EV traffic we also could expect a very substantial reduction of pollution thus altogether an enormous ecological and economic progress.