Katie Leung, Transportation Engineering masters student won the grand prize in the 2013 Institute of Transportation Engineers San Francisco Bay Area Section student paper competition last month.
Leung gave a presentation based on her winning paper, “Connecting Vehicles and ITS infrastructure,” at the section’s April 18 meeting, where the prize was announced.
Her presentation focused on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology, in which vehicles continuously send and share with one another information such as speed, location, potential conflicts and sudden maneuvers.
In addition to safety gains, the system creates a “domino effect of information distribution,” as Leung put it in her presentation. By sharing information about incidents such as crashes, congestion or bad weather, vehicles could devise alternate routes and navigate around the problem areas, reducing travel time and increasing safety.