Cooperative systems - traffic management centres of the future?

What will the traffic management centre of the future see and do? TNO's Frans op de Beek, who was responsible for putting together the Cooperative Mobility Demonstrations which included the Traffic Management Centre at this year's Intertraffic exhibition in Amsterdam, offers some insights

The road tours and demonstrations which took place at this year's Intertraffic to mark the conclusion of COOPERS, CVIS and SAFESPOT, the 1690 European Commission's (EC's) three major cooperative mobility projects, gave visitors to the show a glimpse of some of the safety and mobility technologies and applications that we can expect to see emerge onto the market over the next few years.

One of the exhibits, the Cooperative Mobility Traffic Management Centre (TMC - see Sidebar, 'What 2020 will look like'), allowed visitors to observe the applications being presented on the road tours and gave some idea of what the future traffic manager's workplace will look like.

However, taking the TMC from 'here' to 'there' in terms of procedural and technological issues still requires a lot of work, according to TNO's Frans op de Beek, one of the team responsible for pulling the 70 Intertraffic TMC display together.

"The Cooperative Mobility TMC showed how information from suitably equipped vehicles, nomadic devices and infrastructure will be collated and disseminated in the future," he says.

"Some of the applications demonstrated are more short-term, in the sense that they are already happening. Fleet management, for example, already goes on. The future will be more challenging, as all of those people using our transport infrastructures will be equipped with navigation devices. That will make it possible to pass routes to follow to all vehicles on the network and to better manage all traffic flows."

That contrasts sharply with current loop-based origin-destination estimation, he says: "Tremendous amounts of calculation go into this and it's based on best guess using limited observations and models. But once we have a situation where every vehicle on the road is able to state where it wants to get to we'll be able to understand the mobility needs for people and goods as well as get a very good insight into all traffic flows. Then we'll be able to look at specific groups and apply selective re-routing to those heading for certain destinations or those vehicles in certain areas. That's a very challenging application to realise but it's far better and more proactive than what we have now.

"Service providers in the private sector, such as 1692 TomTom, already provide services which are heading in a similar direction. To realise cooperative mobility we need better cooperation between the automotive industry, the consumer electronics sector and roads authorities. Other stakeholders include the telecommunications providers and, of course, the users."

The Netherlands, he notes, is just one of many developed countries which is installing significant numbers of new generation traffic management systems. These need to be coordinated and controlled at the network level in order to derive the best from them and to be prepared for the future of cooperative systems.

"The priority is to have the existing systems able to communicate and then incorporate cooperative services or applications. So, for example, eCall is an application which we're looking to combine with existing incident management tools and procedures."

Road map

The various cooperative mobility projects already have road maps for development and deployment. There isn't a separate one for TMCs, however, and op de Beek says that as cooperative infrastructures mature further the need for a specific road map is perhaps becoming more apparent.

"There's going to be a tremendous increase in the amounts of information which need to be validated and combined; the TMC operator will need to be provided with aggregated, integrated data. Privacy will also have to be respected, although paradoxically there are cases, eCall being one of them, where less privacy is desirable. Standardisation and architecture are going to be tremendously important."

FP8, the EC's next framework programme for research, is the best place to address this, op de Beek feels.

"The successors to COOPERS, CVIS and SAFESPOT will be looking at how to move from research and development to becoming deployment-ready. Achieving organisation and gaining stakeholder commitment is going to be far more important than the technology. The business models and deployment strategies which have already been worked on need much more elaboration."

Harmonisation, he continues, needs to take place in three principle areas: on the road network itself; among the telecommunications providers; and among the in-vehicle systems providers.

"At the network level, where TMCs belong, the roads authorities need to take a prime role; the EasyWay project is one of the groups which is looking at how to go about this," op de Beek notes. (See ITS International March-April 2010, pp.17-18 for an interview with EasyWay chairman Dean Herenda.)

What 2020 will look like?

The Cooperative Mobility TMC gave Intertraffic visitors an idea of what the TMC of 2020 will look like. It introduced the concepts of cooperative systems from both the traffic management operator's and the driver's perspective.

Three groups of cooperative applications were shown: collection, processing and measures. These included:

• Strategic routing based on live traffic data information provided by the Netherlands' National Data Warehouse and the City of Amsterdam. Data-pooling of advanced traffic state information supported the traffic manager in his or her decision-making and CVIS-equipped vehicles which sent back data describing events on the road network (congestion, incidents/accidents and so on) both in real time and aggregated over a time period. Fleet monitoring showed how vehicles will be monitored and provided with improved guidance information.

• The information distribution chain in a cooperative system enabling future applications to improve traffic safety, traffic flow and traffic pollution was also demonstrated. Based on this traffic information, in the future vehicles will be rerouted or drivers provided with more specific advice.

• More advanced routing strategies where Variable Message Signs (VMS), dynamic speed limits and dynamic traffic light control are all working in synchronization while making at the same time relevant information available along the road and in the car.

• State-of-the-art TMC equipment displayed different views of the traffic situation such as mapbased online traffic status data and bus positions, together with current speed limits and VMS information, other dynamic presentations of cooperative applications and a live video.

Future roles

Uncertainty is the only certainty when one looks to define the TMC's role in the future. In some respects, we can expect to see the TMC gain in importance. In others, its role will change.

"At present if we look at the value chain - data collection, processing, management and dissemination - then the TMC is the most effective disseminator. But cooperative systems could change the TMC's position within the chain. Traffic management will remain a core function but I can see travel information services being demised to the private sector," says op de Beek. "So in the 2020-2050 timeframe, will we still have them informing about traffic jams, for instance? Industry is already interested in developing these services and there's already natural competition between the public and private sectors. It'll take years for the transitions to take place completely but it will grow very quickly.

"Some TMCs already buy in traffic data services, such as those provided by floating vehicles. Some roads authorities have already subcontracted maintenance and operation of loops; they are focusing on core services and I can see network operations being taken to an altogether higher level as a result.

"At the front end, we can expect the TMC to change very little - the physical mix of large and small displays will remain remarkably familiar. The background functions, however, will be markedly different. Besides the channeling of information to the individual traveler, rather than the rather more blunt and ineffective approaches that we have now, we can also expect to see managed access to urban areas become the norm, as well as more focused management of parking and scheduled major events. A key change is also expected in the strategy of traffic management. The TMC is moving from just reacting to the current incidents and the network status to proactive traffic management also aimed at preventing the incidents from occurring at all. Cooperative driving provides plenty of good tools with which to make this possible."

Timescales

Working groups involving both the public and private sectors are already engaged and we can expect to see the results of these efforts start to be implemented over the next 10 to 15 years, op de Beek says.

"Economic stimulus will be a factor. Vehicle sales are increasing again and congestion is an ever-present problem. Secondly, we can expect a greater effort to manage traffic in an environmentally friendly way. Given the lifecycles of vehicles we can expect high penetration of the vehicular technologies inside two decades.

"The lifecycles of infrastructural systems are closer to the 15 to 20-year mark and systems being installed now or about to be installed will have to take account of future applications. In the Netherlands, for example, we're now at the stage of defining the coming generation of Roadside Units [RSUs]. We're debating whether cooperative mobility functionalities need to be included, and at this stage we're very much convinced that they do. This will also have an impact on the TMC.

"Exactly when that next generation of RSUs will become universal depends on where individual countries are in the lifecycle of infrastructure components. It will happen sooner where the installed base is limited or older and the Netherlands, for one, is already at the infrastructure replacement or upgrade point.