TRAFFIC congestions and accidents are major concerns in today’s transportation systems. This thesis investigates how to improve traffic throughput by reducing or eliminating bottlenecks on highways, in particular for merging situations such as intersections where a ramp leads onto the highway. In our work, cars are equipped with sensors that can measure distance to neighboring cars, and communicate their velocity and acceleration readings with one another. Sensor-enabled cars can locally exchange sensed information about the traffic and adapt their behavior much earlier than regular cars. / We propose proactive algorithms for merging different streams of sensor-enabled cars into a single stream. A proactive merging algorithm decouples the decision point from the actual merging point. Sensor-enabled cars allow us to decide where and when a car merges before it arrives at the actual merging point. This leads to a significant improvement in traffic flow as velocities can be adjusted appropriately. We compare proactive merging algorithms against the conventional priority-based merging algorithm in a controlled simulation environment. Experimental results show that proactive merging algorithms outperform the priority-based merging algorithm in terms of flow and delay. / More importantly, the imprecise information (errors in sensor measurements) is a major challenge for merging algorithms, because inaccuracies can potentially lead to unsafe merging behaviors. In this thesis, we investigate how the accuracy of sensors impacts merging algorithms, and design robust merging algorithms that tolerate sensor errors. Experimental results show that one of our proposed merging algorithms, which is based on the theory of time geography, is able to guarantee safe merging while tolerating two to four times more imprecise positioning information, and can double the road capacity and increase the traffic flow by 25%.

TRAFFIC congestions and accidents are major concerns in today’s transportation systems. This thesis investigates how to improve traffic throughput by reducing or eliminating bottlenecks on highways, in particular for merging situations such as intersections where a ramp leads onto the highway. In our work, cars are equipped with sensors that can measure distance to neighboring cars, and communicate their velocity and acceleration readings with one another. Sensor-enabled cars can locally exchange sensed information about the traffic and adapt their behavior much earlier than regular cars. / We propose proactive algorithms for merging different streams of sensor-enabled cars into a single stream. A proactive merging algorithm decouples the decision point from the actual merging point. Sensor-enabled cars allow us to decide where and when a car merges before it arrives at the actual merging point. This leads to a significant improvement in traffic flow as velocities can be adjusted appropriately. We compare proactive merging algorithms against the conventional priority-based merging algorithm in a controlled simulation environment. Experimental results show that proactive merging algorithms outperform the priority-based merging algorithm in terms of flow and delay. / More importantly, the imprecise information (errors in sensor measurements) is a major challenge for merging algorithms, because inaccuracies can potentially lead to unsafe merging behaviors. In this thesis, we investigate how the accuracy of sensors impacts merging algorithms, and design robust merging algorithms that tolerate sensor errors. Experimental results show that one of our proposed merging algorithms, which is based on the theory of time geography, is able to guarantee safe merging while tolerating two to four times more imprecise positioning information, and can double the road capacity and increase the traffic flow by 25%.

In freight transportation, a waybill is an important document that contains essential information about a consignment. The focus of this thesis is on a multi-purpose electronic waybill (e-Waybill) service, which can provide the functions of a paper waybill, and which is capable of storing, at least, the information present in a paper waybill. In addition, the service can be used to support other existing Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) services by utilizing on synergies with the existing services. Additionally, information entities from the e-Waybill service are investigated for the purpose of knowledge-building concerning freight flows. A systematic review on state-of-the-art of the e-Waybill service reveals several limitations, such as limited focus on supporting ITS services. Five different conceptual e-Waybill solutions (that can be seen as abstract system designs for implementing the e-Waybill service) are proposed. The solutions are investigated for functional and technical requirements (non-functional requirements), which can potentially impose constraints on a potential system for implementing the e-Waybill service. Further, the service is investigated for information and functional synergies with other ITS services. For information synergy analysis, the required input information entities for different ITS services are identified; and if at least one information entity can be provided by an e-Waybill at the right location we regard it to be a synergy. Additionally, a service design method has been proposed for supporting the process of designing new ITS services, which primarily utilizes on functional synergies between the e-Waybill and different existing ITS services. The suggested method is applied for designing a new ITS service, i.e., the Liability Intelligent Transport System (LITS) service. The purpose of the LITS service isto support the process of identifying when and where a consignment has been damaged and who was responsible when the damage occurred. Furthermore, information entities from e-Waybills are utilized for building improved knowledge concerning freight flows. A freight and route estimation method has been proposed for building improved knowledge, e.g., in national road administrations, on the movement of trucks and freight. The results from this thesis can be used to support the choice of practical e-Waybill service implementation, which has the possibility to provide high synergy with ITS services. This may lead to a higher utilization of ITS services and more sustainable transport, e.g., in terms of reduced congestion and emissions. Furthermore, the implemented e-Waybill service can be an enabler for collecting consignment and traffic data and converting the data into useful traffic information. In particular, the service can lead to increasing amounts of digitally stored data about consignments, which can lead to improved knowledge on the movement of freight and trucks. The knowledge may be helpful when making decisions concerning road taxes, fees, and infrastructure investments.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / With the rapid development of intelligent transport system in the world during the past few years, it promotes some navigation & location technology to a wide application especially in the car application. This paper firstly introduces some kinds of navigation & location systems and then analyzes the advantage and disadvantage of each system. On the basis of integrating every system and considering the high accuracy which can be achieved by adopting the technology based on DGPS (Differential Global Position System) at present, vehicle navigation & location system based on DGPS/INS/GIS integrated technology is put forward. The propound of this system shortens the distance between academic plan and real application greatly, and it provides a high accuracy and high reliability navigation & location system for traffic department and some car manufacturing Inc. In addition, this system is also provided with a friendly interface that makes it very easy to the manipulator or the user. The emphasis of this paper is put on the hardware and software of this system through introducing the system performance, the system component and the system software, and the characteristic of each module that makes up the whole system. The propound of the vehicle navigation & location system based on DGPS/INS/GIS integrated technology is a new attempt for development of intelligent transport system in our country, it will be sure to accelerate the process of our intelligent transport system.

This thesis will research and evaluate the state of the current ETSI VAM standard. The thesis evaluates and discusses the means of improving the speed and response of ETSI VAM by reducing the load on the radio medium. The research looks to prove that fewer messages broadcasted improve VRU awareness. The thesis focuses mainly on the benefits of VRU clustering as a means of reducing radio medium load through numerical evaluation and physical implementation testing. Evaluation of basic and alternate cluster parameters is performed to find the most optimal ones; alternate clustering strategies are also discussed and proposed. The thesis aims to improve the standard by finding and evaluating alternate methods and parameters in order to propose improved options. / Projektet utvärderar och diskuterar sätten att förbättra hastigheten och responsen hos ETSI VAM genom att minska belastningen på radiomediet. Forskningen syftar till att bevisa att färre meddelanden som sänds förbättrar systemets VRU-medvetenhet. Fokuset ligger huvudsakligen på att utvärdera fördelarna med "VRU-klustring" som ett sätt att minska radiomediebelastningen genom numerisk utvärdering och fysisk testning. Utvärdering av grundläggande och alternativa klusterparametrar utförs för att hitta de mest optimala; alternativa klustringsstrategier diskuteras och föreslås också. Projektet syftar till att förbättra standarden genom att hitta och utvärdera alternativa metoder och parametrar för att föreslå förbättrade alternativ.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / With the rapid development of urban economy, there are bus increasing, route extending, and shuttle frequency increasing etc. At the same time, road construction is subject to land surface, so traffic jam often occurs. It is a big trouble for life of citizens and problem for economy development. So it needs to be improved as fast as possible. Vehicle monitoring system for public traffic in Beijing can expediently monitor the state of each controlled bus, thereby making perfect management. With the integration of GPS, analog trunked communication and digital map, the old, blinding manage system of public traffic would be changed into advanced, visualized management mode, and several routes are dispatched in one dispatch center at the same time. The system frame and its components are introduced in this paper.

The increasing use of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) can enable very close vehicle spacings which generally results in a net drag reduction for the resulting convoys. The majority of vehicle development has, to date, been for vehicles in isolation, thus the study of interaction effects is becoming increasingly important. The main objective of this research is to investigate the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for understanding convoy aerodynamics and to further the understanding of airflow interaction between vehicles via CFD. In this study, time-averaged characteristics of a simplified, generic passenger vehicle, called the Ahmed car model, after Ahmed et.al (1984) is investigated computationally using the available commercial CFD code, Fluent version 6.1.22. Three different platoon combinations were analysed for the current study which includes a two, three and six model platoons for various rear end configurations of the Ahmed model geometry. Experiments were conducted in RMIT University Industrial Wind Tunnel for analysing the effects of drafting on drag coefficients using two different scales of Ahmed car models. This is an extension to the previous study performed on two 100% scales of Ahmed models (Vino and Watkins, 2004) and the results for both the current and previous experiments were compared using CFD. The CFD proved to be a useful technique since its results compared reasonably well for both the current and the previous experiments on drafting, using Ahmed models of identical (30°) rear slant configurations. However, near critical rear slant angles (~30°) for isolated vehicles some discrepancies were noted. The reasonable validation of experimental results enabled the study to be extended further computationally using CFD, to analyse the effects of inter-vehicle spacing on a platoon of 3 and 6 models for various rear end configurations (between 0° and 40°), in an attempt to provide useful information on vehicle-wake interaction for the Future Generation Intelligent Transport System (FGITS). Critical gaps were identified via CFD for the case of a two, three and six model platoons and the simulations clearly exposed the reasons for these critical gaps. At extremely close proximity, the models experienced more pressure recovery at their rear vertical base, which reduced the drag coefficient. Surprisingly, at some of the close vehicle spacings, the drag coefficients reached values that were higher than that of a vehicle in isolation. This was found due to the high momentum flow impingement to the fore body of the model and was similar to results found in physical experiments. Thus the current CFD analysis revealed that rear slant angle of the model and the inter-vehicle spacing greatly influences the wake structures and ultimately the vehicles aerodynamic drag coefficients in platoons. Even though the current CFD model (Realizable k-B turbulence model) predicted the basic flow structures such as the C-pillar vortices from the rear slant and 2D horse shoe vortices in the model's vertical rear base, the separation bubble on the rear slant that supplies energy to the strong C-pillar vortices was not replicated accurately, which is evidenced from the flow structure analysis. Hence it is recommended for further work, that the study should be extended using the Reynold's stress models or the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) turbulence models for flow structure observation and analysing vortex interactions between the models.

There are still many challenges in the field of VANETs that encouraged researchers to conduct further investigation in this field to meet these challenges. The issue pertaining to routing protocols such as delivering the warning messages to the vehicles facing Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) situations without causing the storm problem and channel contention, is regarded as a serious dilemma which is required to be tackled in VANET, especially in congested environments. This requires the designing of an efficient mechanism of routing protocol that can broadcast the warning messages from the emergency vehicles to the vehicles under NLOS, reducing the overhead and increasing the packet delivery ratio with a reduced time delay and channel utilisation. The main aim of this work is to develop the novel routing protocol for a high-density environment in VANET through utilisation of its high mobility features, aid of the sensors such as Global Positioning System (GPS) and Navigation System (NS). In this work, the cooperative approach has been used to develop the routing protocol called the Co-operative Volunteer Protocol (CVP), which uses volunteer vehicles to disseminate the warning message from the source to the target vehicle under NLOS issue; this also increases the packet delivery ratio, detection of NLOS and resolution of NLOS by delivering the warning message successfully to the vehicle under NLOS, thereby causing a direct impact on the reduction of collisions between vehicles in normal mode and emergency mode on the road near intersections or on highways. The cooperative approach adopted for warning message dissemination reduced the rebroadcast rate of messages, thereby decreasing significantly the storm issue and the channel contention. A novel architecture has been developed by utilising the concept of a Context-Aware System (CAS), which clarifies the OBU components and their interaction with each other in order to collect data and take the decisions based on the sensed circumstances. The proposed architecture has been divided into three main phases: sensing, processing and acting. The results obtained from the validation of the proposed CVP protocol using the simulator EstiNet under specific conditions and parameters showed that performance of the proposed protocol is better than that of the GRANT protocol with regard to several metrics such as packet delivery ratio, neighbourhood awareness, channel utilisation, overhead and latency. It is also successfully shown that the proposed CVP could detect the NLOS situation and solves it effectively and efficiently for both the intersection scenario in urban areas and the highway scenario.

Les systèmes d'aide à la conduite gèrent un grand volume de données qui doivent être mises à jour régulièrement. Cependant, ces systèmes ne permettent, ni de les stocker, ni de les gérer d'une manière efficace. Pour ces raisons, nous proposons l'intégration d'un système de bases de données temps réel (TR) dans les systèmes d'aide à la conduite. Cela permet d'améliorer la tolérance aux fautes, de réduire le nombre de transactions et de réduire leur temps de réponse. La gestion d'un grand volume de données et leurs contraintes TR rend ces systèmes plus complexes, ce qui rend leur modélisation plus difficile. Pour remédier à cette complexité, nous avons proposé trois patrons de conception en nous basant sur un processus de création de patrons. Ce processus permet de définir les étapes à suivre pour déterminer les fonctionnalités et les exigences du domaine d'aide à la conduite, d'une part, et de définir les règles d'unification pour générer les diagrammes UML de classes et de séquence, d'autre part. Pour représenter ces patrons, nous avons proposé le profil UML-RTDB2, pour tenir compte : (i) de l'expression de la variabilité des patrons, (ii) de la représentation des contraintes TR et des aspects non fonctionnels et (iii) des éléments instanciés à partir des patrons lors de la modélisation d'une application cible. Une fois les patrons créés, ils peuvent être réutilisés par les concepteurs pour modéliser des systèmes spécifiques. Pour cela, nous avons proposé un processus de réutilisation pour guider les concepteurs d'applications lors de la réutilisation des solutions de patrons. Enfin, nous avons procédé à l'évaluation de ces patrons en utilisant deux catégories de métriques. / Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) manage an important volume of data that must be updated regularly. However, ADAS don't store, nor manage efficiently these data. For these reasons, we propose to integrate a real-time (RT) database system into ADAS. The integration of the RT database system allows improving the fault tolerance, reducing the number of transactions and minimizing their response time. The management of a lot of data makes these systems complex, thus, their design is highly difficult. To tackle this problem, we have proposed three patterns based on the pattern development process. This process allows defining the steps to follow in order to determine the functionalities and the requirements of the driver assistance domain on one hand, and defining the unification rules for the generation of the UML class and sequence diagrams, on the other hand. In order to represent these patterns, we have proposed UML-RTDB2 profile, which allows (i) expressing the variability of patterns, (ii) representing the real time constraints and the non functional properties and (iii) identifying the role played by each pattern element in a pattern instance. Once the proposed patterns are created, they can be reused by designers to model a specific application. For this reason, we have proposed a process to assist the applications designers when instantiating the patterns solutions. Finally, we have evaluated these patterns based on two categories of metrics.

During the last decades the road traffic has increased tremendously leading to congestion, safety issues and increased environmental impacts. As a result, many countries are continuously trying to find improvements and new solutions to solve these issues. One way of improving the traffic conditions is by the use of so called intelligent transport systems, where information and communication technologies are being used for traffic management and control. One such system commonly used for traffic management purposes are variable speed limit systems. These systems are making use of signs to show speed limits adjusted to the prevailing road or traffic conditions. The rapid development in telecommunication technologies has enabled communication between vehicles, and between vehicles and the infrastructure, so called cooperative systems. This opens up for  the possibility to further improve the performance of a standard variable speed limit system by adding cooperative system features. The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential benefits of incorporating infrastructure to vehicle communication and autonomous control to an existing variable speed limit system. We show how such a cooperative variable speed limit system can be modeled and evaluated by the use of microscopic traffic simulation. Results from the evaluation indicate increased flow harmonization in terms of narrowing of the acceleration rate distribution and reduced exhaust emissions. Further, we compare four control algorithms for deciding on speed limits in variable speed limit systems. Differences in the resulting traffic performance between the control algorithms are quantified by the use of microscopic traffic simulation. It is concluded that the dened objective for the algorithms have a decisive influence on the effects of the variable speed limit system. The results from this thesis are useful for further development of variable speed limit systems, both with respect to incorporating cooperative features and by improving the speed setting control algorithms.