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Wolfram High School
Summer Research Program

Formerly known as the Wolfram High School Summer Camp

Bentley University, Boston, MA June 25–July 13, 2024

Alumni

Eddie Kim

Class of 2019

Bio

HyunMin Kim, known by others as Eddie Kim, is currently a rising Junior at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois. He likes to spend his time playing soccer, skiing, eating new food, learning new programming languages, and hanging out with friends. He is actively involved in Glenbrook North's soccer team, math team, and coding club. Eddie is part of the Glenbrook Symphony Orchestra, where he plays the cello. He is comfortable with working with programming languages such as Java and C++ although he prefers to use HTML, CSS, and Javascript alongside Node.js, which he and his team used to win a Hackathon. Although he lives in Illinois, he is a Packers fan and hopes that they will win in the 2019-2020 season.

Project: Simulating Different Rules For a Four-Way Intersection

Goal

The project I will work on will be primarily determining various rules for a four-way intersection and determining the level of efficiency each provides to various types of traffic flow. The project will involve creating a simulation where vehicles interact with each other in the intersection. Each rule will be simulated for efficiency by various intervals in which they arrive in an intersection. The primary goal of this project is to find a set of the most efficient rules for all of the different types of traffic flow on average.

Summary of Results

When starting with this project, I initially considered dynamically figuring out every single position of each car and comparing them to figure out how each car should behave. I successfully created an algorithm to stop at the intersection. The problem I encountered when working with this way was when two cars couldn't be in the intersection at the same time. I moved on from this approach because I figured that having loops to compare the positions of each car would be very inefficient and unnecessary. Moving from this approach, I made all computations based on the cars in the intersection and the cars at the stop sign. The cars in the initial positions were randomly created by a function. I made another variation of traffic flow that sends cars at set and random intervals.

Future Work

There are many steps that could be taken to further this project. In the future, I want to experiment with more types of intersections. Since I only concentrated on four-way intersections, I think it would be very interesting to look into intersections such as roundabouts and various n-way intersections. Also, although I am aware that it would be very hard, I want to figure out how the traffic would be with acceleration.