Overview
For many years, the principle way of adapting to increasing traffic demand has been to increase the capacity of the roadway network by building new roads or adding new lanes to existing ones. However, financial and ecological considerations are posing increasingly severe constraints on this process. Hence, there is a need for additional intelligent approaches designed to meet the demand by using more efficiently the existing infrastructure and resources. Public authorities have taken a step into this direction through the installation of traffic management systems with an intention of equalizing traffic demand both temporally (by spreading out trips in time) and spatially (by redistributing demand).
However, such collective systems for traffic management suffer from several inherent limitations: Firstly, they are unable to provide continuous, up to the minute information to drivers. secondly, it is impossible to restrict advice to a targeted sub-group of drivers, for example to those with a particular destination area. The options for collective route guidance are essentially 'all or nothing'.
On the other hand, in the future private service operators will provide a rising level of traffic information services targeted to the user's need in order to find the fastest or shortest route. Modern navigation systems are designed to take delays, due to incidents or congestion, into account dynamically, provided that these delays have been previously reported and transmitted to the device, e.g., by broadcast media such as TMC in Europe. The reaction of present route guidance systems to delays is a short-term and/or small-scale strategy. Comprehensive optimization of dynamic routing strategies dos not exist. Moreover, current systems are incapable in taking into account the influence of public traffic management strategies, such as traffic signal coordination. The cluster project is part of the research initiative INVENT.
The main objectives are to reconcile and synthesize commercial route guidance recommendations with public policy and collective interests, as well as to stimulate further development of vehicle navigation.
In particular, the objectives are:
- To develop and demonstrate intelligent, traffic - responsive navigation solutions;
- To improve organization and management of traffic demand;
- To develop and test new algorithms by incorporating diverse available sources of traffic data and information as well as public traffic management and control strategies and priorities into integrated comprehensive systems.
- The implementation of routing systems of the third generation as prototypes in test sites located in Munich and Magdeburg, Germany.
An analysis of the present and anticipated traffic state in the entire roadway network and the identification of reserve capacity comprising the basis for third-generation navigation systems. Mobile and stationary sensors collect the appropriate traffic data and transmit it to a central unit. Similarly to the weather forecast, the diverse and heterogeneous sources of data are combined to result a prognosis of the traffic state during a period ranging from minutes to hours or even longer. In this manner, a comprehensive knowledge base is built up to support optimal individual route guidance.
In addition to the effective and reliable data fusion and forecasting algorithms, the approach requires modern communication solutions as well as robust and easily operated user interfaces. Traffic Network Equalization is developing and testing a range of technological components and comprehensive solutions. The organization of these activities is modelled on the classical information processing chain for traffic information and navigation services, data collection, data processing, service provision, and the navigation device itself. The system architecture of this project will connect the various technological components and integrate them into a coordinated concept.