Ants and iPhones may help in reducing traffic jams

Surely one of the most irritating ways to waste energy and time is sitting in heavy traffic with the  engine idling. Is there any technology on the horizon to eliminate or mitigate traffic jams? Ants and iPhones may lead the way.

Research by collective intelligence expert Dr. Dirk Helbing of the Dresden University of Technology in Germany indicates that ants and their rough–and-ready methods of communication may be ahead of us in smoothening traffic congestion by communication and feedback of optimal routes.

“[Dr. Helbing’s] team set up an "ant motorway" with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup. Soon the narrower route soon became congested. But when an ant returning along the congested route to the nest collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer onto the other path.

However, if the returning ant had enjoyed a trouble-free journey it did not redirect the newcomer. The result was that just before the shortest route became clogged the ants were diverted to another route and traffic jams never formed.

The researchers also created a computer model of more complex ant networks with routes of different lengths. The team found that even though ants being rerouted sometimes took a longer route, they still got to the food quickly and efficiently.”

Pushing another car onto what you know will be a more freely-moving route isn’t an option for traffic-hackers. So what is an option for traffic-flow communication?

At last week’s MEMs Executive Congress held in Monterey CA, Dr. Tapani Ryhanen, head of strategic research at the Nokia Research Center, cited the potential for mobile phones to become instantaneous de facto wireless sensor networks with one of the most practical applications being traffic management. Cell phones already have image sensors as a standard component, and accelerometers and gyroscopes seem likely to become standard accessories also, giving fine-grained acceleration/deceleration and position information.

Privacy issues will be a likely stumbling block along with technology issues, but perhaps cellular service providers will pay cell phone users to allowing access to positional information by subsidizing cell phone plans – and then charging more for traffic flow information.