Internet Traffic Jams

Or at least, using the internet to help reduce traffic jams.

In metropolitan Boston, the MIT has been running a project, CarTel, which has been tracking the driving patterns of GPS-equipped taxis. In moving traffic, those vehicles all represent moving nodes on a network that happen to be drifting in and out of close contact with one another.

The CarTel project is involved in the development of new software algorithms that optimise information-sharing between those mobile network those nodes, in order to try to predict when traffic jams may be likely to occur, and maybe even prevent them from occurring.