bookbashuk Chapter 234 Intelligent Transportation
Chapter 234 Intelligent Transportation
On the day the traffic efficiency data for Hangzhou was released, a vice minister from the Ministry of Transport flew to Hangzhou with his team.
He sat in Zuo Cheng's office for less than an hour before putting down a document.
A nationwide transportation brain network plan connecting twelve key cities.
Zuo Cheng opened the document. The first line read the project name: National Intelligent Transportation Hub Construction Project. Further down, a list of twelve cities was provided: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Nanjing, Xi'an, Zhengzhou, Hefei, Changsha, and Chongqing. This covered all the core urban clusters in North China, East China, South China, Central China, Southwest China, and Northwest China.
The vice minister's meaning was straightforward: Hangzhou's data speaks for itself—a 60% increase in efficiency for a single city. If all twelve cities were connected, the effect wouldn't simply be multiplied by twelve; it would generate a synergistic effect of cross-city collaboration. Could peak outbound traffic on highways and peak inbound traffic in other cities be synchronized? Could cross-provincial traffic flow during the Spring Festival travel rush be predicted in advance and diverted? Could congestion in popular tourist cities during holidays be flexibly alleviated through the road networks of surrounding cities?
These things cannot be accomplished by a single city's traffic management system; a national-level central hub is needed.
"The joint dispatch center will be located at the 402 headquarters in Hangzhou." The vice minister's tone didn't sound like he was soliciting opinions. "The Ministry of Transport will send a resident team there, and the 402 headquarters will be responsible for the technical architecture."
After listening, Zuo Cheng asked a question: "What is the required delay?"
"Within five milliseconds."
There was a two-second silence in the conference room.
What does five milliseconds mean? The latency for satellite communication between the Tianqi constellation and Earth is 28 milliseconds, already the lowest globally. However, urban traffic management requires latency that is an order of magnitude higher than ordinary communication. Beyond five milliseconds, real-time dispatch instructions may deviate from actual road conditions. On an urban expressway with a speed of 80 kilometers per hour, five milliseconds means a vehicle has moved 11 centimeters. Eleven centimeters may not seem like much on a single lane, but on a high-density road section with multiple lanes and parallel lane changes, an 11-centimeter delay deviation can accumulate into a potential chain-reaction collision.
Shen Yiming led his team to start working on the problem that very night.
The conventional approach is to use terrestrial fiber optic communication directly. However, the twelve cities span over 3,000 kilometers, and fiber optic signals inevitably experience relay delays over long distances. Even with the best fiber optic infrastructure, the end-to-end delay from the central node to the furthest point, Chongqing, is at least eight to ten milliseconds. A delay of five milliseconds is unattainable with a purely terrestrial network.
Shen Yiming's solution is a quantum edge node.
Instead of sending all data back to the central node in Hangzhou for computation, a quantum edge computing node is deployed in each city. Each node is responsible for processing local real-time traffic data, uploading only summary data that requires cross-city coordination to the central hub. The computation latency for local data can be reduced to less than one millisecond. Cross-city collaborative data is transmitted through the quantum-encrypted channel of the Tianqiong constellation, and the central hub aggregates the data before issuing scheduling instructions.
He built a prototype system within three days. At four o'clock in the morning on the fourth day, he completed the first full-link test in the laboratory. The data was collected in Beijing, preprocessed by the quantum edge node, and the abstract data was uploaded to the Tianqiong constellation. The Hangzhou central hub received and processed the data, and the scheduling instructions were sent to a simulated intersection in Chengdu.
The entire process was delayed by 3.2 milliseconds.
He sent a screenshot of the test results to Zuo Cheng. Zuo Cheng replied with two words: "Awesome."
The first phase will launch in four cities: Shenzhen, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Wuhan.
The data summary for the first week of launch was released in the second week.
Average commute time decreased by 23%. This figure is already impressive for a single city, but the data on cross-city collaboration is even more noteworthy. Taking the intercity expressway between Shenzhen and Guangzhou as an example, after the system went online, the duration of congestion during weekday morning rush hour was reduced from two hours and forty minutes to one hour and fifteen minutes. The system predicts the peak traffic flow from Shenzhen to Guangzhou in advance and implements traffic control and guidance at the exit points, allowing traffic to enter the intercity expressway at a more even rate and avoiding large-scale congestion caused by a simultaneous surge onto the expressway at one point.
The accident rate dropped by 31 percent. This figure required the Ministry of Transport's analysis team to double-check it three times to confirm there were no statistical errors.
The on-time rate of public transportation has improved to 97.8%. Real-time scheduling of buses and subways no longer relies on human experience and judgment, but is driven by the globally optimal solution calculated by quantum computing every 30 seconds.
Three days after the data came out, Wei Dongsheng made a phone call.
"Brother Cheng, can your traffic dispatch system connect directly to the vehicle's onboard system?"
Wei Dongsheng is the founder of a leading new energy vehicle company in China and an old friend of Zuo Cheng from his university days. The direct connection he refers to means pushing the traffic brain's dispatch instructions directly to the vehicle's infotainment system. The current model involves the traffic brain optimizing road network traffic lights and recommending routes, but drivers don't necessarily follow the recommended routes. If the system directly connects to the vehicle's infotainment system, with the owner's authorization, the in-vehicle navigation can automatically execute the optimal route. Simultaneously, the vehicle's real-time location and speed data can be fed back to the traffic brain, further improving the accuracy of overall dispatch.
Zuo Cheng said yes.
A week later, twelve automakers signed an agreement for in-vehicle access to the city's traffic brain system. The list included Wei Dongsheng's company, as well as joint ventures in China of three international brands. The core terms of the agreement were uniform: 402 would provide standardized in-vehicle data interfaces and real-time dispatch push services, and automakers would be responsible for integrating this interface into their in-vehicle systems.
This means that every car on the road in the future, regardless of its brand, will be under the overall control of the 402 Sky Dome.
At the signing ceremony, a reporter asked Zuo Cheng: What does it mean that twelve car companies signed at the same time?
Zuo Cheng's answer was straightforward: "Roads don't belong to any one car manufacturer; they belong to all drivers. Similarly, dispatch systems shouldn't be exclusive to any one brand. Standardizing interfaces so that every vehicle can connect to the same central system—that's true intelligent transportation."
After the signing ceremony, Shen Yiming did one thing: he upgraded all the quantum edge nodes in the twelve cities to the second generation. The computing power of the second-generation nodes is three times that of the first generation, and the latency has been further compressed to 2.1 milliseconds. This number is close to the theoretical limit. At the end of his internal technical report, he wrote: "Under the current physical architecture, 2.1 milliseconds is the ceiling. To push it further, a quantum communication network is needed to achieve true end-to-end quantum entanglement transmission. This technology is theoretically feasible, but its engineering implementation will take at least five to ten years."
After reading the report, Zuo Cheng circled this line of text without making any annotations.
That afternoon, after the vehicle access agreement was signed, Yu Ying placed a medical industry analysis on Zuo Cheng's desk.
"Transportation is the artery, medicine is the nerve," she said. "The artery is open; now it's time to connect the nerve."
Zuo Cheng turned to the first page. It read: Of the more than 1,500 top-tier hospitals nationwide, fewer than 80 have installed the interstellar neural brain-computer interface device, representing an installation rate of less than 5%.
He stared at the number for a long time.