Research Archive

AERIS Research Program Overview

The vision for the Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS) Research Program is "Cleaner Air through Smarter Transportation." The AERIS Research Program was established by the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Joint Program Office (JPO) to investigate whether it was possible and feasible to:

  • Identify connected vehicle applications that could provide environmental impact reduction benefits via reduced fuel use and efficiency impacts on emissions.
  • Facilitate and incentivize "green choices" by transportation service consumers (i.e., system users, system operators, policy decision makers, etc.).
  • Identify vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) data (and other) exchanges via wireless technologies of various types.
  • Model and analyze connected vehicle applications to estimate the potential environmental impact reduction benefits.
  • Develop a prototype for one of the applications to test its efficacy and usefulness.

Employing a multi-modal approach, the AERIS Research Program aims to encourage the development of technologies and applications that support a more sustainable relationship between transportation and the environment chiefly through fuel use reductions and resulting emissions reductions.

AERIS News and Updates

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AERIS Operational Scenarios

The Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS) Research Program defined five Operational Scenarios and eighteen unique connected vehicle applications that sought to reduce fuel consumption and vehicle emissions. AERIS Operational Scenarios include: Eco-Signal Operations, Eco-Lanes, Low Emissions Zones, Eco-Traveler Information, and Eco-Integrated Corridor Management (Eco-ICM). Each Operational Scenario encompassed a set of applications which individually achieved environmental benefits. However, by strategically bundling the applications, the AERIS Program saw that the Operational Scenarios could achieve additional environment benefits above those of the individual applications. Many of these first-of-their-kind applications were innovative and transformative. The AERIS team created Concept of Operations (ConOps) documents for each of the five Operational Scenarios to guide analysis, modeling, simulation, and prototyping. Learn more about the AERIS Operational Scenarios and Applications.