Traffic control in coherence-multiplexed networks

Coherence multiplexing (CM) is a relatively unknown form of optical CDMA, which is particulary suitable in medium bit rate, short-range optical networks like LANs. The main purpose of the technique is to allow multiple users to transmit through a common optical fiber simultaneously. When this number is too large, however, the BER will become unacceptably high. Therefore a protocol is needed to control the traffic. In this paper several protocols are presented. An adapted version of synchronous TDMA, two new protocols and a central control unit will be proposed and discussed. Finally, the protocols will be compared with respect to performance and practical implementation aspects

ICT Infrastructure for Cooperative, Connected and Automated Transport in Transition Areas

One of the challenges of automated road transport is to manage the coexistence of conventional and highly automated vehicles, in order to ensure an uninterrupted level of safety and efficiency. Vehicles driving at a higher automation level may have to change to a lower level of automation in a certain area under certain circumstances and certain (e.g. road and weather) conditions. The paper targets the transition phases between different levels of automation. It will review related research, introduce a concept to investigate automation level changes, present some recent research results, i.e. assessing key performance indicators for both analysing driver behaviour and traffic management in light of autonomous vehicles, an initial simulation architecture, and address further research topics on investigation of the traffic management in such areas (called "Transition Areas") when the automation level changes, and development of traffic management procedures and protocols to enable smooth coexistence of automated, cooperative, connected vehicles and conventional vehicles, especially in an urban environment

Investigating the Efficiency of ITS Cooperative Systems for a Better Use of Urban Transport Infrastructures: The iTETRIS Simulation Platform

The use of cooperative ITS communication systems, supporting driving through the dynamic exchange of Vehicle-to- Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) messages, is a potential candidate to improve the economical and societal welfare. The application of such systems for novel cooperative traffic management strategies can introduce a lot of beneficial effects not only for road safety, but also for the economy related to transportation systems and the environmental impact. Despite this apparent set of promising features, City Road Authorities, which hold a key-role in determining the final adoption of such systems, still look at cooperative systems without sharing a clear opinion. This is mainly due to the current lack of definitive and solid evidences of the effectiveness of such systems when applied in the real world. In order to fill this gap and let Road Authorities estimate the usefulness of such technologies in achieving the objectives dictated by cities’ traffic management policies, the EU consortium iTETRIS is developing a simulation platform for large scale testing of traffic management solutions making use of cooperative ITS systems. Thanks to its own distinguishing features, iTETRIS aims at becoming a good supporting tool for Road Authorities to implement preliminary tests on the effectiveness of ITS solutions prior to investing money for the physical deployment of the communication infrastructures allowing their functioning

COLOMBO Deliverable 1.1: Scenario Specifications and Required Modifications to Simulation Tools

While targeting on supporting descriptions of scenarios and extensions to the simulation suite, the document additionally delivers a complete overview of the evaluation procedures to use in COLOMBO. Starting with an overview of the evaluation process, based on work done in the FESTA project, the document includes definitions of the performance indicators to use. These were originally produced by the iTETRIS project (by consortium partners of COLOMBO, mainly) and was extended within COLOMBO by performance indicators that describe the behaviour of inter-vehicle communication. To put the work on a scientific ground, a performed comparison of 40 scientific simulation studies is given, that shows that no standard scenarios and metrics exist. Additionally the document lists feature extensions which shall be implemented into the simulation tools within the COLOMBO project. Applicable software and data yielding to the scenarios were provided to the COLOMBO partners. As targeted, the document lists the scenarios made available within COLOMBO, distinguishing synthetic and real-world scenarios. Overall, seven scenarios based on real-world data were made available. Additionally, a tool that allows generating a large variety of synthetic scenarios is presented. The document ends with an extension (against the one given in D5.1) of requirements put on the simulations suite

MAVEN Deliverable 6.4: Integration Final Report

This document presents the work that has been performed in WP6 after D6.3, and therefore focussing on the integration sprints 3-6. It describes which parts of the system are implemented and how they are put together. To do so, it builds upon the deliverables created so far, esp. D6.3 and all other deliverables of the underlying work packages 3, 4 and 5. Another important aspect for understanding the content of this deliverable is D2.1 [4] for the scenario definition of the whole MAVEN project, and the deliverables D6.1 [5] and D6.2 [6], which give an overview on the existing infrastructure and vehicles used in MAVEN

MAVEN Deliverable 7.2: Impact Assessment - Technical Report

This deliverable focuses on an important topic within the MAVEN project - evaluation of the project impact. This is an important step that will allow us to say what the results and impact of the different technologies, functionalities as well as assumptions are. It covers different dimensions of the impact assessment as stated in the Deliverable D7.1 - Impact assessment plan [10]. The field tests proved that the technology in the vehicle works together with the infrastructure and the solution is technically feasible. This was demonstrated also during particular events and is reported in the attached test protocols. At the same time, the emulation and simulation in Dominion software proved the functionality, for example with respect to the cooperative perception or safety indicators. The tests also proved that the key performance indicator "minimum time to the collision" decreases when applying the cooperative sensing. Also, the number of human interventions needed was zero in all the tests. This deliverable also discussed selected results of a detailed user survey aiming at understanding the expected impacts and transition of automated vehicles. The overall number of respondents reached 209. The responses have revealed some interesting facts. For example, over 80% of the respondents believe that CAVs will decrease the number of traffic accidents. Similarly, about 70% of the respondents expect improvements in traffic congestions. Over 82% of respondents declared that they would accept some detour when driving if it helps the overall traffic situation. The literature review, however, indicated that autonomous vehicles will have either a positive or a negative effect on the environment, depending on the policies. For example, opening cars as a mode of transport to new user groups (seniors, children etc.) together with improvements of the traffic, flow parameters can increase the traffic volume on roads. Policy makers shall focus on the integration of the CAVs into a broader policy concept including car or ride-sharing, electromobility and others. In order to evaluate the transition, for example, the influence of different penetration rates of CAVs on the performance, a microscopic traffic simulation was performed. Here the particular MAVEN use cases, as well as their combination, was addressed. The results of the simulation are rather promising. The potential for improvements in traffic performance is clearly there. It was demonstrated that a proper integration of CAVs into city traffic management can, for example, help with respect to the environmental goals (Climate Action of the European Commission) and reduce CO2 emissions by up to 12 % (a combination of GLOSA and signal optimization). On corridors with a green wave, a capacity increase of up to 34% was achieved. The conclusions from this project can be used not only by other researchers but mainly by traffic managers and decision-makers in cities. The findings can get a better idea about the real impacts of particular use cases (such as green wave, GLOSA and others) in the cities. An important added value is also the focus on the transition phase. It was demonstrated that already for lower penetration rates (even 20% penetration of automated vehicles), there are significant improvements in traffic performance. For example, the platooning leads to a decrease of CO2 emissions of 2,6% or the impact indicator by 17,7%

Investigating the Efficiency of ITS Cooperative Systems for a Better Use of Urban Transport Infrastructures: The iTETRIS Simulation Platform

The use of cooperative ITS communication systems, supporting driving through the dynamic exchange of Vehicle-to- Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) messages, is a potential candidate to improve the economical and societal welfare. The application of such systems for novel cooperative traffic management strategies can introduce a lot of beneficial effects not only for road safety, but also for the economy related to transportation systems and the environmental impact. Despite this apparent set of promising features, City Road Authorities, which hold a key-role in determining the final adoption of such systems, still look at cooperative systems without sharing a clear opinion. This is mainly due to the current lack of definitive and solid evidences of the effectiveness of such systems when applied in the real world. In order to fill this gap and let Road Authorities estimate the usefulness of such technologies in achieving the objectives dictated by cities’ traffic management policies, the EU consortium iTETRIS is developing a simulation platform for large scale testing of traffic management solutions making use of cooperative ITS systems. Thanks to its own distinguishing features, iTETRIS aims at becoming a good supporting tool for Road Authorities to implement preliminary tests on the effectiveness of ITS solutions prior to investing money for the physical deployment of the communication infrastructures allowing their functioning

Enhanced Traffic Management Procedures of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in Transition Areas

In light of the increasing trend towards vehicle connectivity and automation, there will be areas and situations on the roads where high automation can be granted, and others where it is not allowed or not possible. These are termed ‘Transition Areas’. Without proper traffic management, such areas may lead to vehicles issuing take-over requests (TORs), which in turn can trigger transitions of control (ToCs), or even minimum-risk manoeuvres (MRMs). In this respect, the TransAID Horizon 2020 project develops and demonstrates traffic management procedures and protocols to enable smooth coexistence of automated, connected, andconventional vehicles, with the goal of avoiding ToCs and MRMs, or at least postponing/accommodating them. Our simulations confirmed that proper traffic management, taking the traffic mix into account, can prevent drops in traffic efficiency, which in turn leads to a more performant, safer, and cleaner traffic system, when taking the capabilities of connected and autonomous vehicles into account

TransAID Deliverable 6.2/2 - Assessment of Traffic Management Procedures in Transition Areas

This Deliverable 6.2 of the TransAID project presents and evaluates the simulation results obtained for the scenarios considered during the project's first and second iterations. To this end, driver- and AV-models designed in WP3, traffic management procedures developed in WP4, and V2X communication protocols and models from WP5 were implemented within the iTETRIS simulation framework. Previous main results from Deliverable 4.2, where baseline and traffic management measures without V2X communication were compared, have been confirmed. While not all TransAID scenarios' traffic KPIs were affected, the realistic simulation of V2X communication has shown a discernible impact on some of them, which makes it an indispensable modelling aspect for a realistic performance evaluation of V2X traffic scenarios. Flaws of the first iteration's traffic management algorithms concerning wireless V2X communication and the accompanying possibility of packet loss were identified and have been addressed during the project's second iteration. Finally, lessons learned while working on these simulation results and assessments have additionally been described in the form of recommendations for the real-world prototype to be developed in WP7. We conclude that all results obtained for all scenarios when employing ideal communication confirmed the statistical trends of the results from the original TM scenarios as reported in Deliverable 4.2 where no V2X communication was considered. Furthermore, the performance evaluation of the considered scenarios and parameter combinations has shown the following, which held true in both the first and second iterations: (1) The realistic simulation of V2X communication has an impact on traffic scenarios, which makes them indispensable for a realistic performance evaluation of V2X traffic scenarios. (2) Traffic management algorithms need to account for sporadic packet loss of various message types in some way. (3) Although important, the realistic modelling and simulation of V2X communication also induces a significant computational overhead. Thus, from a general perspective, a trade-off between computation time and degree of realism should be considered

Advantage of cooperative traffic light control algorithms

Based on the presentation at ITS Europe Congress Glasgow 2016. Contemporary traffic light control (TLC) systems rely on sensors for detection of traffic which are costly in purchase, installation and maintenance. Emerging cooperative technology offers an attractive alternative where only one road side unit per intersection is required, instead of several infrastructure sensors per lane. However, studies showed that traffic control with cooperative detection requires a penetration rate of at least 20% to function effectively. To show the potential of cooperative traffic control, this study presents three algorithms: (i) the SWARM control algorithm, which is designed to work with very low penetration rates; (ii) an extension to the adaptive control algorithm, ImFlow, which uses cooperative data for enhanced queue modelling; and (iii) an ImFlow extension to stabilise green planning to enable green light optimal speed advice. The results from micro-simulation show a 7.8% improvement for stops and delay time over traditional adaptive control for SWARM, and 14.9% for Cooperative ImFlow. Adding planning stabilisation reduced the average perceived change for end users from 9.0-2.3%, without performance loss for the overall traffic flow. This shows the large potential of cooperative traffic control