Christos Cassandras is part of a research group aiming to ease traffic congestion and air pollution by developing energy-efficient smart vehicle technology under the Energy Department’s ARPA-E’s NEXTCAR program. The team includes researchers at the University of Delaware, the University of Michigan, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Bosch as a corporate partner. The goal is to design control and optimization technologies that enable a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV) to communicate with other cars and city infrastructure and act on that information. By providing cars with situational self-awareness, they will be able to efficiently calculate the best possible route, accelerate and decelerate as needed and manage their powertrain.
Two years into the project, our PHEV, a 2016 Audi A3 e-tron, is now undergoing live testing in M-city. You can find out more by watching this movie.
