Ramona Adams
PARC has received funds from the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to develop a mobile application model that will cater to individual travelers and drive energy savings in transportation.
Under ARPA-E’s Traveler Response Architecture using Novel Signaling for Network Efficiency in Transportation program, the Xerox-owned company said Tuesday it will partner with Virginia Tech Transportation Institute to build the app.
The app will use human cognitive modeling to suggest the most potentially energy-efficient ways of traveling through modifications in the user’s travel behavior, PARC added.
Potential travel suggestions include mode shifting, changes in departure time and driving behavior and peer or third-party carpooling.
“Phase 1 will be evaluated on a micro-simulation model of Los Angeles, built by our team members at the VTTI,” said Christian Fritz, PARC research and planning manager and principal investigator of the project.
PARC said the TRANSNET project aims to demonstrate the likelihood of a 12-percent energy savings turnout with 10 percent of LA’s commuters who use the app.
“If the project is proven successful, we will work with Xerox and the city of LA to deploy it as an extension to the recently launched Xerox Go LA app,” Fritz added.
