Use of discrete choice to obtain urban freight evaluation data

The ex-ante evaluation of urban freight solutions is a complex task, due to the interference of different stakeholder groups with different views and objectives. The multi-actor multi-criteria methods have developed as a response to this scenario, but the determination of the weights required by them remains an unclear and controversial task. We propose the use of discrete choice methods as a powerful tool to confront these multi-faced evaluation problems, since the resulting surveys are flexible and easy to respond, and do not give away the final quantitative results. We have applied this methodology to the selection of urban freight solutions in the city of Seville, in Spain, followed by the determination of the relative weights associated to different objectives, both analyses carried out from the side of the carriers stakeholder group.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2013-47286-C3-3-

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Pay for Intersection Priority: A Free Market Mechanism for Connected Vehicles

The rapid development and deployment of vehicle technologies offer opportunities to re-think the way traffic is managed. This paper capitalizes on vehicle connectivity and proposes an economic instrument and corresponding cooperative framework for allocating priority at intersections. The framework is compatible with a variety of existing intersection control approaches. Similar to free markets, our framework allows vehicles to trade their time based on their (disclosed) value of time. We design the framework based on transferable utility games, where winners (time buyers) pay losers (time sellers) in each game. We conduct simulation experiments of both isolated intersections and an arterial setting. The results show that the proposed approach benefits the majority of users when compared to other mechanisms both ones that employ an economic instrument and ones that do not. We also show that it drives travelers to estimate their value of time correctly, and it naturally dissuades travelers from attempting to cheat

Validation of trajectory planning strategies for automated driving under cooperative, urban, and interurban scenarios.

149 p.En esta Tesis se estudia, diseña e implementa una arquitectura de control para vehículos automatizados de forma dual, que permite realizar pruebas en simulación y en vehículos reales con los mínimos cambios posibles. La arquitectura descansa sobre seis módulos: adquisición de información de sensores, percepción del entorno, comunicaciones e interacción con otros agentes, decisión de maniobras, control y actuación, además de la generación de mapas en el módulo de decisión, que utiliza puntos simples para la descripción de las estructuras de la ruta (rotondas, intersecciones, tramos rectos y cambios de carril)Tecnali