Overview
Transportation systems are evolving towards Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), where there is closed loop interaction between vehicles/drivers and the transportation infrastructure, as enabled by cooperative V2X communications and cellular networks. While some of the enabling technologies are entering their mature phase, there is still the need of a complete integrated solution that can take the most benefits from a real-time analysis of the data gathered and appropriate reaction on the transportation system.
This requires a higher level of intelligence to be integrated into the sensing and communication infrastructures, with decentralized aggregation and decision for robust and timely decisions to be taken. Finally, an additional and significant improvement can be brought by using tools that enable a pro-active decision making process, with the integration of predictive models running in real-time alongside the reaction schemes. The dependence on road transport in our daily lives has grown massively in recent years, in line with the problems arising from its use: permanent congestion on highways and urban centres, energy waste, CO2 emissions mass with consequent impact public health and high rates of accidents on the road networks. These challenges are even more pressing if we take into account the forecast growth in transport, as estimated by the Transport White Paper (March 2011) congestion costs will increase by about 50% by 2050. Therefore, the main objective derived from them is to ensure that the mobility and transport are: more efficient, safer and energetically sustainable. Taking into account these considerations, ICSI proposal aims to address simultaneously the challenges raised and thus give a qualitative leap towards the future mobility.
This raises the implementation of a platform to merge and integrate heterogeneous data sources into a common system and provide a set of advanced tools for control, monitoring, simulation and prediction of traffic, that achieves a safer, sustainable and uncongested road.
The goal of the project is to define a new architecture to enable cooperative sensing in intelligent transportation systems and to develop a reference end-to-end implementation.
The project results will enable advanced traffic and travel management strategies, based on reliable and real-time input data. The effectiveness of such new strategies, together with the proposed system, will be assessed in two field trials.
Funding
Results
To overcome the limitations of the current systems, there has been proposed a new architecture where the intelligence for sensing and actuation is distributed over some of the elements, called gateways, which host a software platform for running ITS applications, using the local storage and computation capabilities available.
The proposed system aims at achieving significant energy efficiency in transportation systems through faster, dependable, and more accurate sensing cycles and reactions, as enabled by the fully distributed architecture. It has been envisaged that most noticeable reductions in the emissions of CO2 will be experienced in urban transportation systems.
The final report firstly defines the trial scenarios identified for the two different experimental facilities to be set-up: the smart urban and the highway environments. In this respect, the infrastructure definition in agreement with the respective providers, namely Pisamo and BRISA, will be described and specifications will be given. Secondly, metrics for assessing the consistency, correctness, and the performance with respect to global requirements will be defined and described. Among these, a major relevance will concern: real-time traffic monitoring, real-time traffic flows, vehicle tracking and V2X communications.