Heavy morning traffic at a large intersection, next to it a school, bike paths, regular buses and a crossing tram – a challenging situation for traffic planning as well as for all road users (VTN). Increasing traffic in inner-city areas aggravates the conflict between safety, traffic efficiency, and environmental pollution. Intersections are critical nodes in traffic networks, which, however, are currently largely simplified, mostly only controlled via fixed, pre-defined traffic light phase schedules. Inflexible, sub-optimal traffic light control can lead to unnecessary traffic jams and emissions. Individual needs, requirements and possibilities of different road users cannot be considered up to now. In principle, modern ICT, communication and control concepts offer the potential to comprehensively manage and optimize intersection traffic in a fine resolution in real time, considering the requirements of all road users, interpret the situations in the best possible way and implementing individual, coordinated, cooperative control strategies to realize a holistic optimum. This idea motivates the present R&D project.
In this project, novel, integrated and flexible communication, control and simulation methods are to be developed to implement an “intelligent intersection” system: available real-time information on the positions, speeds and expected behaviour of the road users (such as networked vehicles or also vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, etc.) are recorded, linked and used in real time to simultaneously 1) ensure traffic safety for all road users in the context of an intersection, 2) efficiently regulate the flow of traffic, and thus 3) optimize the overall energy consumption and minimize traffic emissions resulting from passing the intersection. The inclusion of the many, heterogeneous relevant stakeholders in the sense of the human-centered design principle, the effective technical design and solution of the necessary optimization, control and communication approaches, as well as the evaluation of these solutions go far beyond the state of the art and require R&D work carried out in this project.
The connection of context information (time of day, weather, regional traffic volume), real-time data provided by modern road users (e.g. networked vehicles with assistance systems) or data from innovative traffic monitoring systems for all individual road users (e.g. pedestrians or cyclists) make it possible to capture the intersection situation in detail, control it efficiently, resolve dangerous situations effectively or prevent them altogether in advance. To this end, new communication methods for the interaction with different road users are being conceptualized. In addition to the design methods for realizing an intelligent intersection, the project also produces valid quantitative statements of the benefits generated for the various user groups (various road users including pedestrians), residents, operators, public actors and traffic planners. Finally, the interdisciplinary, inclusive methodology for obtaining these findings is provided beyond current state of the art.
