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SUMMARY
Traffic congestion is a significant problem in most major European cities, and has been estimated to cost as much as 1% of EU GDP. In its present form, the use of Traffic Light to control and regulate road traffic has proven to be very costly and inadequate scalable. Through leveraging the new vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication capability of modern cars, the VTL (Virtual Traffic Lights) project proposes to design and validate an alternative scheme of urban traffic control that envisions traffic lights as in-vehicle virtual signs. Such a scheme would enable ubiquity of signalised intersections, and would allow the automatic synchronisation of light phases, cycle durations and green splits through the coordination of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs).
The project team will aim to take advantage of the mandatory adoption by the automotive industry of the Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE) protocol, and the ability of vehicles to communicate with each other, thus creating a distributed and highly reliable system of in-vehicle virtual traffic lights (VTL). Preliminary simulations of this self-organising traffic paradigm show a potential to increase the average flow rates substantially. In addition, traffic control and management will be rendered more ubiquitous and cost-effective.
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SOLUTIONS
- Creating an automated, self-organising system which, through the use of vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication will allow the replacement of physical traffic lights with more efficient and cost-effective virtual, in-vehicle traffic lights
- Designing a VTL communication protocol and techniques for the distributed optimisation of traffic flow.
- Testing the security and reliability of the VTL system.
- Developing human-machine interface of the VTL system and usability evaluation
- Producing a hardware design for retrofitting and field trial experiments.
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LINK: http://www.it.pt/project_detail_p.asp?ID=1730
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