The company Planung Transport Verkehr (PTV) from Karlsruhe, Germany, has recently presented an interactive vehicle navigation system coupled with intelligent transport systems. The testing site was Dortmund.
The new electronic system, after entering the destination we want to travel to, is able to find and suggest alternative routes if necessary. In this way, it shortens travel time on increasingly congested roads.
PTV, together with Siemens, the city authorities of Dortmund, and Ertico (a European research group dealing with intelligent transport systems), presented the operation of the interactive system, which is part of a larger whole called Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS). The system is based on the interaction between the vehicle, technological infrastructure, and traffic management centers. The essence of the entire undertaking is the implementation of a procedure that differs for cities, regions, and countries. Ultimately, if all vehicles equipped with a navigation device can use the interactive system, all road traffic could be diverted from the most congested areas at any given time. For example, during peak traffic hours in city centers, the stream of vehicles not heading to these areas will be diverted from residential districts via alternative roads. Vehicles will be able to continuously bypass sections of road works or the vicinity of places where events causing traffic congestion are taking place, such as sports events, cultural events, or trade fairs.
– The greatest advantage of the system is that suggestions for bypassing congested or impassable places appear immediately. Until now, such systems operated with a delay, if they worked at all before the traffic difficulties disappeared on their own. The interactive system informs the driver in advance, which allows for directing streams of vehicles depending on emerging obstacles not only in urban areas but also on the outskirts of cities and beyond – says Michael Ortgiese, responsible for the project on behalf of PTV.
The key to constructing such an interactive system is answering the question of how to manage and communicate simultaneously between car traffic control systems and transport systems. The answer is the creation of specially organized management centers working at the intersection of these two systems. The driver, using their navigation device, asks whether a specific obstacle has appeared on the route planned by the device. If so, the management center sends an alternative route option back to the device.
The flow of information depends on the occurrence of a situation hindering traffic. These are predefined in the form of keywords, e.g., “congestion,” “traffic jam,” “slippery road,” or “road works,” defining situations that the driver wants to avoid. After specifying the destination, the driver sends such a defined obstacle to the system management center. There, ready-made solutions to the problems, prepared in advance by traffic experts, are waiting. The planned solutions are activated or not, depending on whether the obstacles included in the keywords have appeared on the route planned by the navigation. If so, a suggestion to bypass them is sent to the navigation device.
CVIS Project
The goal of the CVIS research project is to use cooperative road traffic supervision and transport systems to improve the fluidity of traffic flows, increase safety, and reduce environmental pollution. CVIS is funded by the European Union and was planned for the years 2007-2010. More than 60 international partners from various industries are working on the implementation of smaller projects within CVIS. The technology for cooperative transport and road traffic systems managed in urban areas was developed and tested as the sub-projects COMO (Cooperative Monitoring) and CURB (Cooperative Urban Applications).