Agent Based Traffic Signals Regulating Flow On a Basic Grid

A simulation study on traffic light optimisation with agent-based behaviour of the traffic signals

Quality of Floating Car Data

Meanwhile, Floating Car Data (FCD) is a widely available and affordable data source for traffic surveillance. The German Aerospace Center, Institute of Transportation Systems (DLR-TS) receives FCD from taxi-fleets ranging from 300 to 4000 vehicles from various German and European cities since the year 2002. To extract common traffic variables like travel times or travel speeds and generate traffic information out of it, the raw GPS data of the vehicles are matched to a digital road network. However, compared to data from inductive loops, where each vehicle passing a loop generates data and the whole traffic flow is covered, the FCD represent only singular measurements. Thus, they are very noisy (especially when passing signalized intersections) and typically need to be aggregated to yield useful information. This means, a single delivered value is not very reliable and does not necessarily represent the state of the traffic flow on the according street segment. Data from some vehicles have to be aggregated and smoothed for some time interval and/or space to obtain reliable traffic information

Automatic relocation of link related data in an updated road map

For a rising number of ITS applications, location information obtained by the processing of sensor data is related to the links of a specific digital road map. Such maps are available from different vendors like Here, TomTom/TeleAtlas and OSM. They are created with different philosophies, resulting in significant differences in the geometry and the topology of the road networks. If a map needs to be updated to a new release, the user faces the problem that a relocation of any annotated location data, i.e. a proper mapping of these locations from the old to the new map becomes necessary. For this reason, DLR developed a new prototypic software application called DataRelocator@Map2Map. It enables the automatic relocation of location data between the two maps. Using this new tool, an almost fully automatic relocation is possible and thus the cost of service failures related to the map update can be avoided

ANALYZING AND COMPARING TRAFFIC NETWORK CONDITIONS WITH A QUALITY TOOL BASED ON FLOATING CAR AND STATIONARY DATA

Cities with medium to high traffic volumes are expected to keep the traffic rolling in a most efficient way. Accidents, construction sites or large events are counteracting this effort. In addition, cities are facing the fact that traffic signal plans configured and optimized several years ago are no longer suitable for current traffic volumes. Expert knowledge of traffic engineers as well as reports from citizens may help to find out on irregular or inefficient traffic flow. However, in most cases it is fairly impossible to determine if observed deviations from the expected traffic conditions occur only once, periodically or permanently. Therefore there is a need to explore the causes for the changed traffic flows, and also for evaluating the impacts of construction sites, events, or changed traffic signal control plans in a systematic manner. For tackling this task, a prototype of a traffic quality analysis tool (TQAT) is developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It is based on a tool which came into operation for the representation of recent traffic conditions during the soccer world championship 2006 in Germany in the police department of Cologne (1). The prototype of the TQAT is set up as an application for the City of Nuremberg within the project ORINOKO

Experiences Building an Environment friendly its in the City of Huainan

Huainan is a former mining city with about 3 million inhabitants which means in China a classification as a "third-tier" city. In this class of city are more than 200 other cities in China, which shows the great potential that Huainan has to act as a pioneer and possible blueprint for other cities. During the application phase, the progressive ideas of the city government led to experts from DLR being invited to integrate sustainable and environmental protection aspects into the project, subsumed in the "German Innovation Package". The project to set up the new ITS was planned for 2 years (2018-2020) plus a phase of 3 years for maintenance which was also used for optimization and enhancements. This contribution describes the main results und experiences of the overall project and new core functionalities of the integrated modules developed by DLR, namely a traffic and environment dashboard and weekly/monthly reports about the ITS situation, all integrated in the established web-portal KeepMoving

Event traffic forecast for metropolitan areas based on microscopic simulation

It is shown that a traditional travel demand forecast combined with a simulationbased approach can serve as a short-term forecast for the traffic situation. The approach presented was developed and tested during the Soccer World Cup 2006 in the city of Cologne as a service for the action forces to react as fast as possible to developing aberrations. This paper discusses the merits and the short-comings of the approach

Optimizing Traffic Lights in a Cellular Automaton Model for City Traffic

We study the impact of global traffic light control strategies in a recently proposed cellular automaton model for vehicular traffic in city networks. The model combines basic ideas of the Biham-Middleton-Levine model for city traffic and the Nagel-Schreckenberg model for highway traffic. The city network has a simple square lattice geometry. All streets and intersections are treated equally, i.e., there are no dominant streets. Starting from a simple synchronized strategy we show that the capacity of the network strongly depends on the cycle times of the traffic lights. Moreover we point out that the optimal time periods are determined by the geometric characteristics of the network, i.e., the distance between the intersections. In the case of synchronized traffic lights the derivation of the optimal cycle times in the network can be reduced to a simpler problem, the flow optimization of a single street with one traffic light operating as a bottleneck. In order to obtain an enhanced throughput in the model improved global strategies are tested, e.g., green wave and random switching strategies, which lead to surprising results.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

ANALYZING AND COMPARING TRAFFIC NETWORK CONDITIONS WITH A QUALITY TOOL BASED ON FLOATING CAR AND STATIONARY DATA

Cities with medium to high traffic volumes are expected to keep the traffic running in a most efficient way. Accidents, construction sites or large events are counteracting this effort. In addition, cities are facing the fact that traffic signal plans configured and optimized several years ago are no longer suitable for current traffic volumes. Expert knowledge of traffic engineers as well as reports from citizens may help to find out on irregular or inefficient traffic flow. However, in most cases it is fairly impossible to determine whether observed deviations from the expected traffic conditions occur only once, periodically or permanently. Therefore there is a need to explore the causes for the changed traffic flows, and also for evaluating the impacts of construction sites, events, or changed traffic signal control plans in a systematic manner. For tackling this task, a prototype of a traffic quality analysis tool (TQAT) is being developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It is based on a tool which came into operation for the representation of recent traffic conditions during the soccer world championship 2006 in Germany in the police department of Cologne (1). The prototype of the TQAT is set up as an application for the City of Nuremberg within the project ORINOKO