The urban real-time traffic control (URTC) system : a study of designing the controller and its simulation

The growth of the number of automobiles on the roads in China has put higher demands on the traffic control system that needs to efficiently reduce the level of congestion occurrence, which increases travel delay, fuel consumption, and air pollution. The traffic control system, urban real-time traffic control system based on multi-agent (MA-URTC) is presented in this thesis. According to the present situation and the traffic's future development in China, the researches on intelligent traffic control strategy and simulation based on agent lays a foundation for the realization of the system. The thesis is organized as follows: The first part focuses on the intersection' real-time signal control strategy. It contains the limitations of current traffic control systems, application of artificial intelligence in the research, how to bring the dynamic traffic flow forecast into effect by combining the neural network with the genetic arithmetic, and traffic signal real-time control strategy based on fuzzy control. The author uses sorne simple simulation results to testify its superiority. We adopt the latest agent technology in designing the logical structure of the MA-URTC system. By exchanging traffic flows information among the relative agents, MA-URTC provides a new concept in urban traffic control. With a global coordination and cooperation on autonomy-based view of the traffic in cities, MA-URTC anticipates the congestion and control traffic flows. It is designed to support the real-time dynamic selection of intelligent traffic control strategy and the real-time communication requirements, together with a sufficient level of fault-tolerance. Due to the complexity and levity of urban traffic, none strategy can be universally applicable. The agent can independently choose the best scheme according to the real-time situation. To develop an advanced traffic simulation system it can be helpful for us to find the best scheme and the best switch-point of different schemes. Thus we can better deal with the different real-time traffic situations. The second part discusses the architecture and function of the intelligent traffic control simulation based on agent. Meanwhile the author discusses the design model of the vehicle-agent, road agent in traffic network and the intersection-agent so that we can better simulate the real-time environment. The vehicle-agent carries out the intelligent simulation based on the characteristics of the drivers in the actual traffic condition to avoid the disadvantage of the traditional traffic simulation system, simple-functioned algorithm of the vehicles model and unfeasible forecasting hypothesis. It improves the practicability of the whole simulation system greatly. The road agent's significance lies in its guidance of the traffic participants. It avoids the urban traffic control that depends on only the traffic signal control at intersection. It gives the traffic participants the most comfortable and direct guidance in traveling. It can also make a real-time and dynamic adjustment on the urban traffic flow, thus greatly lighten the pressure of signal control in intersection area. To sorne extent, the road agent is equal to the pre-caution mechanism. In the future, the construction of urban roads tends to be more intelligent. Therefore, the research on road agent is very important. All kinds of agents in MA-URTC are interconnected through a computer network. In the end, the author discusses the direction of future research. As the whole system is a multi-agent system, the intersection, the road and the vehicle belongs to multi-agent system respectively. So the emphasis should be put on the structure design and communication of all kinds of traffic agents in the system. Meanwhile, as an open and flexible real-time traffic control system, it is also concerned with how to collaborate with other related systems effectively, how to conform the resources and how to make the traffic participants anywhere throughout the city be in the best traffic guidance at all times and places. To actualize the genuine ITS will be our final goal. \ud ______________________________________________________________________________ \ud MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Artificial Intelligence, Computer simulation, Fuzzy control, Genetic Algorithm, Intelligent traffic control, ITS, Multi-agent, Neural Network, Real-time

Driver lane change intention inference for intelligent vehicles: framework, survey, and challenges

Intelligent vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) need to have proper awareness of the traffic context as well as the driver status since ADAS share the vehicle control authorities with the human driver. This study provides an overview of the ego-vehicle driver intention inference (DII), which mainly focus on the lane change intention on highways. First, a human intention mechanism is discussed in the beginning to gain an overall understanding of the driver intention. Next, the ego-vehicle driver intention is classified into different categories based on various criteria. A complete DII system can be separated into different modules, which consists of traffic context awareness, driver states monitoring, and the vehicle dynamic measurement module. The relationship between these modules and the corresponding impacts on the DII are analyzed. Then, the lane change intention inference (LCII) system is reviewed from the perspective of input signals, algorithms, and evaluation. Finally, future concerns and emerging trends in this area are highlighted

Edge-powered Assisted Driving For Connected Cars

Assisted driving for connected cars is one of the main applications that 5G-and-beyond networks shall support. In this work, we propose an assisted driving system leveraging the synergy between connected vehicles and the edge of the network infrastructure, in order to envision global traffic policies that can effectively drive local decisions. Local decisions concern individual vehicles, e.g., which vehicle should perform a lane-change manoeuvre and when; global decisions, instead, involve whole traffic flows. Such decisions are made at different time scales by different entities, which are integrated within an edge-based architecture and can share information. In particular, we leverage a queuing-based model and formulate an optimization problem to make global decisions on traffic flows. To cope with the problem complexity, we then develop an iterative, linear-time complexity algorithm called Bottleneck Hunting (BH). We show the performance of our solution using a realistic simulation framework, integrating a Python engine with ns-3 and SUMO, and considering two relevant services, namely, lane change assistance and navigation, in a real-world scenario. Results demonstrate that our solution leads to a reduction of the vehicles' travel times by 66 in the case of lane change assistance and by 20 for navigation, compared to traditional, local-coordination approaches.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.0933

Driver lane change intention inference using machine learning methods.

Lane changing manoeuvre on highway is a highly interactive task for human drivers. The intelligent vehicles and the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) need to have proper awareness of the traffic context as well as the driver. The ADAS also need to understand the driver potential intent correctly since it shares the control authority with the human driver. This study provides a research on the driver intention inference, particular focus on the lane change manoeuvre on highways. This report is organised in a paper basis, where each chapter corresponding to a publication, which is submitted or to be submitted. Part Ⅰ introduce the motivation and general methodology framework for this thesis. Part Ⅱ includes the literature survey and the state-of-art of driver intention inference. Part Ⅲ contains the techniques for traffic context perception that focus on the lane detection. A literature review on lane detection techniques and its integration with parallel driving framework is proposed. Next, a novel integrated lane detection system is designed. Part Ⅳ contains two parts, which provides the driver behaviour monitoring system for normal driving and secondary tasks detection. The first part is based on the conventional feature selection methods while the second part introduces an end-to-end deep learning framework. The design and analysis of driver lane change intention inference system for the lane change manoeuvre is proposed in Part Ⅴ. Finally, discussions and conclusions are made in Part Ⅵ. A major contribution of this project is to propose novel algorithms which accurately model the driver intention inference process. Lane change intention will be recognised based on machine learning (ML) methods due to its good reasoning and generalizing characteristics. Sensors in the vehicle are used to capture context traffic information, vehicle dynamics, and driver behaviours information. Machine learning and image processing are the techniques to recognise human driver behaviour.PhD in Transpor

Fuzzy logic traffic signal controller enhancement based on aggressive driver behavior classification

The rise in population worldwide and especially in Egypt, together with the increase in the number of vehicles present serious complications regarding traffic congestion and road safety. The elementary solution towards improving congestion is to expand road capacities by building new lanes. This, however, requires time and effort and therefore new methodologies are being implemented. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) try to approach traffic congestion through the application of computational and engineering techniques. Traffic signal control is a branch of intelligent transportation systems which focuses on improving traffic signal conditions. A traffic signal controllers’ main objective is to improve this assignment in a way which reduces delays. This research proposes a new approach to enhancing traffic signal control and reducing delays of a single intersection, through the integration of an aggressive driving behavior classifier. Previous approaches dealt with traffic control and driver behavior separately, and therefore their successful integration is a new challenging area in the field. Multiple experiment sets were conducted to provide an indication to the effectiveness of our approach. Firstly, an aggressive driver behavior classifier using feed-forward neural network was successfully built utilizing Virginia Tech 100-car naturalistic driving study data. Its performance was compared against long short-term memory recurrent neural networks and support vector machines, and it resulted in better performance as shown by the area under the curve. To the best of our knowledge, this classifier is the first of its kind to be built on this 100-car study data. Secondly, a representation of aggressive driving behavior was constructed in the simulated environment, based on real life data and statistics. Finally, Mamdani’s fuzzy logic controller was modified to accommodate for the integration of the aggressive behavior classifier. The integration results were encouraging and yielded significant improvements at higher traffic flow volumes when compared against the built Mamdani’s controller. The results are promising and provide an initial step towards the integration of driver behavior classification and traffic signal control

Investigating Initial Driver Intention on Overtaking on Rural Roads

Driver intention recognition is essential to the development of advanced driver assistance systems providing real-time support. Current approaches for the recognition of overtaking intentions focus on drivers’ observable behaviors, neglecting the fact that the intention to overtake a slower lead car emerges earlier than the resulting behavior. This paper aims to distinguish the "intention emerging process", when drivers form the initial intention to overtake, from the "action executing process", when drivers execute the overtaking maneuver. A driving simulator study has been conducted to investigate the influence of the lead vehicle type and lead vehicle speed on initiating driver’ intention on overtaking on rural roads, and the effect of the complexity of the oncoming traffic on executing overtaking. The results show that the initial driver intention to overtake appears much earlier than the execution of the overtaking maneuver. The lead vehicle speed has a significant influence on initial driver intention in the "intention emerging process", while time to overtake increases with the number of the oncoming vehicles in the "action execution process". These results can contribute to the development of models for driver intention recognition by extending the prediction horizon from the recognition to a prediction of driving maneuvers. Document type: Conference objec

Ordering Networks: Motorways and the Work of Managing Disruption

This thesis contributes to a new understanding of the motorway network and its traffic movements as a problem of practical accomplishment. It is based on a detailed ethnomethodological study of incident management in the Highways Agency’s motorway control room, which observes the methods operators use to detect, diagnose and clear incidents to accomplish safe and reliable traffic. Its main concern is how millions of vehicles can depend on the motorway network to fulfil obligations for travel when it is constantly compromised by disruption from congestion, road accidents and vehicle breakdowns. It argues that transport geography and new mobilities research have overlooked questions of practical accomplishment; they tend to treat movement as an inevitable demand, producing fixed technical solutions to optimise it, or a self-evident phenomenon, made meaningful only through the intensely human experience of mobility. In response, the frame of practical accomplishment is developed to analyse the ways in which traffic is ongoingly organised through the situated and contingent practices that take place in the control room. The point is that traffic does not move by magic; it has to be planned for, produced and persistently worked at. This is coupled with an understanding of network topology that reconsiders the motorway network as always in process by virtue of the materially heterogeneous relations it keeps, drawing attention to the intensely collaborative nature of work between operators and technology that permits the management of disruption at-a-distance and in real time. This work is by no means straightforward – the actions of monitoring, detecting, diagnosing and classifying incidents and managing traffic are revealed to be complexly situated and prone to uncertainty, requiring constant ordering work to accomplish them. In conclusion, this thesis argues for the frame of practical accomplishment to be taken seriously, rendering the work of transport networks available for sustained analysis

Enhancing service quality and reliability in intelligent traffic system

Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) can manage on-road traffic efficiently based on real-time traffic conditions, reduce delay at the intersections, and maintain the safety of the road users. However, emergency vehicles still struggle to meet their targeted response time, and an ITS is vulnerable to various types of attacks, including cyberattacks. To address these issues, in this dissertation, we introduce three techniques that enhance the service quality and reliability of an ITS. First, an innovative Emergency Vehicle Priority System (EVPS) is presented to assist an Emergency Vehicle (EV) in attending the incident place faster. Our proposed EVPS determines the proper priority codes of EV based on the type of incidents. After priority code generation, EVPS selects the number of traffic signals needed to be turned green considering the impact on other vehicles gathered in the relevant adjacent cells. Second, for improving reliability, an Intrusion Detection System for traffic signals is proposed for the first time, which leverages traffic and signal characteristics such as the flow rate, vehicle speed, and signal phase time. Shannon’s entropy is used to calculate the uncertainty associated with the likelihood of particular evidence and Dempster-Shafer (DS) decision theory is used to fuse the evidential information. Finally, to improve the reliability of a future ITS, we introduce a model that assesses the trust level of four major On-Board Units (OBU) of a self-driving car along with Global Positioning System (GPS) data and safety messages. Both subjective logic (DS theory) and CertainLogic are used to develop the theoretical underpinning for estimating the trust value of a self-driving car by fusing the trust value of four OBU components, GPS data and safety messages. For evaluation and validation purposes, a popular and widely used traffic simulation package, namely Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO), is used to develop the simulation platform using a real map of Melbourne CBD. The relevant historical real data taken from the VicRoads website were used to inject the traffic flow and density in the simulation model. We evaluated the performance of our proposed techniques considering different traffic and signal characteristics such as occupancy rate, flow rate, phase time, and vehicle speed under many realistic scenarios. The simulation result shows the potential efficacy of our proposed techniques for all selected scenarios.Doctor of Philosoph

International overview on the legal framework for highly automated vehicles

The evolution of Autonomous and automated technologies during the last decades has been constant and maintained. All of us can remember an old film, in which they shown us a driverless car, and we thought it was just an unreal object born of filmmakers imagination. However, nowadays Highly Automated Vehicles are a reality, even not in our daily lives. Hardly a day we don’t have news about Tesla launching a new model or Google showing the new features of their autonomous car. But don’t have to travel far away from our borders. Here in Europe we also can find different companies trying, with more or less success depending on with, not to be lagged behind in this race. But today their biggest problem is not only the liability of their innovative technology, but also the legal framework for Highly Automated Vehicles. As a quick summary, in only a few countries they have testing licenses, which not allow them to freely drive, and to the contrary most nearly ban their use. The next milestone in autonomous driving is to build and homogeneous, safe and global legal framework. With this in mind, this paper presents an international overview on the legal framework for Highly Automated Vehicles. We also present de different issues that such technologies have to face to and which they have to overcome in the next years to be a real and daily technology