The use of stored public transportation data facilitates the identification of potential issues with urban traffic flow. Focusing on buses, the authors proceed from a city-level delay distribution analysis to a detailed understanding of the factors that cause the delays on an example bus line. First, a database of bus data in Tampere was mined to detect any regular patterns in the distribution of delays in time, location or according to bus line throughout the city. The results allow the authors to focus on those areas and lines which are most prone to delays. In a case study, they illustrate that the most important reasons for tardy journeys are the long waiting times at traffic signals and bus stops, rather than slow driving speeds. The results are then further deepened to show spatially on a map which bus stops and intersections tend to be the ones where the time variances are high. The same methods can be applied to any other city for which the same kind of data are available.

The study proposes an easily deployable platform for providing ubiquitous connectivity to public transportation vehicles. The platform is capable to exploit the connectivity offered by heterogeneous wireless networks owned by different operators and it integrates a centralised information system (CIS) which stores the context information (CI) characterising the heterogeneous networks. The study describes the network and traffic monitoring processes, proposes a synchronisation mechanism between the mobile routers of the vehicles and the CIS and a vertical handover (VHO) mechanism adapted to the developed architecture. Simulation results based on CI acquired during field tests are reported in the study. These results validate the developed VHO mechanism using the locally available or the centralised CI.

The objective of this study is to analyse the interoperability between pan-European eCall and Russian ERA-GLONASS in-vehicle emergency call systems. The analysis is based on a definition of interoperability from International Telecommunication Union and related system standards of eCall and ERA-GLONASS. The authors results indicate that the core functions of both systems – minimum set of data (MSD) transmission at the start of the call and establishing the related voice connection between vehicle occupants and a public safety answering point – will be available in the interworking scenarios analysed in this study. However, not all features of both systems will be available in use cases with interworking between the systems, such as SMS-based MSD retransmission. The study indicates that further empirical tests are required to obtain more information on practical interoperability between the systems.

With the continuous development in the fields of sensors, advanced data processing and communications, road transport oriented intelligent applications and services have reached a significant maturity and complexity. Cooperative ITS services, based on the idea of sharing accurate information among road entities, are currently being tested on a large scale by different initiatives. The field operational test (FOTsis) project contributes to the deployment environment with services that involve a significant number of entities out of the vehicle. This made necessary the specification of an architecture which, based on the ISO ITS station reference architecture for communications, could support the requirements of the services proposed in the project. During the project, internal implementation tests and external interoperability tests have resulted in the validation of the proposed architecture. At the same time, these tests have had as a result the awareness of areas in which the FOTsis architecture could be completed, mainly to take full advantage of all the emerging and foreseeable data sources which may be relevant in the road environment. In this study, the authors will outline an approach that, based on the current cooperative ITS architecture and the SmartCities and Internet Of Things (IoT) architectures, can provide a common convergence platform to maximise the information available for ITS purposes.

Today, the automobile industry and several research institutes develop automated vehicles for several driving applications. With increasing capabilities of automation, the driver can be more and more dispensed from the driving task and might want to use his nomadic devices to get entertained, read the news or do office work while driving. However, in some complex driving situations (such as road works, freeway exit ramps or lane closure because of car accidents), the automation still needs to safely hand over the control to the driver. These situations require a lot of attention by the driver who must not be tempted to ignore the warnings of the assistance system and to continue any task on the nomadic device until a critical situation originates. This study describes a method to link nomadic devices to vehicles to support a safe usage during highly automated driving and a first approach to ensure a safe transition between different automation modes. Therefore the automation system is connected to the nomadic device in the vehicle and has the ability to actively control the content on the screen. The proof of concept is demonstrated in a research vehicle that drives on a simulated motorway.

Cooperative perception makes it possible to provide drivers with early advisory warnings about potentially dangerous driving situations. On the basis of the research results pertaining to imminent crash warnings, it was expected that the effectiveness of such advisory warnings depends on situation-specific anticipations by the driver. During a simulator study, N = 20 drivers went through a wide range of longitudinal traffic and intersection scenarios. The scenarios varied in the possibility to anticipate traffic conflicts (anticipation: high against low) and were completed under different visibility conditions (visibility: obstructed against visible), with and without driver assistance based on cooperative perception (i.e. visual–auditory advisory warnings 2 s prior to the last-possible warning moment; assistance: no assistance against with assistance). The warning concept was based on empirical pre-studies and previously validated on a public test intersection. During non-assisted driving, critical situations were mainly experienced when the possibility to anticipate traffic conflicts was low. Visual obstructions lead to a further increase in the frequency of critical situations. Furthermore, the results indicate a clear mitigation of critical encounters when providing early advisory warnings. This applies particularly to surprising and unexpected scenarios and thus illustrates the potential of cooperative perception to enhance active traffic safety.

Lessons learned from a multi-driver simulator study are presented. The motivation of the use of a multi-driver simulator is outlined by describing the need to study driver–driver interaction and the so far existing insufficient methods. Therefore the multi-driver simulator MoSAIC ‘Modular and Scalable Application-platform for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) components’ at the German Aerospace Center will be presented. Its benefits and requirements in the conduction and analysis of obtained data are derived from theoretical analysis of recent work on multi-driver simulators as well as methodological requirements to study driver behaviour. Based on a study within the German national project UR:BAN (German acronym ‘Urbaner Raum: Benutzergerechte Assistenzsysteme und Netzmanagement’) to evaluate the impact of cooperative ITS on non-equipped drivers, further lessons learned are collected. Driving parameters are operationalised to evaluate the safety criticality as well as the overall acceptance of the equipped driver's behaviour from the perspective of non-equipped naïve drivers. However, main focus is on non-equipped drivers’ behavioural changes in regard to an imitation of the efficient driving behaviour of an equipped driver. Parameters measuring not only individual behavioural adaptation, but also behavioural adaptation of a platoon of drivers are presented. Thus, a step towards a methodology for studies with multi-driver simulators, especially for the data analysis, is made.

For a successful implementation of intelligent transport systems (ITS), technological progresses and innovations are undisputable important. Nevertheless, economic viability may not be forgotten as a prerequisite. Considerable investments for stakeholders (such as public or industry) are needed to equip vehicles, install the necessary infrastructure or to set up traffic management centers. This study enhances the technological perspective on ITS-projects by picking up the topic of economics. In this study, viable business models are acknowledged as a central success factor for the implementation of ITS. The focus, however, lies on the often neglected socio-economic perspective which includes societal costs and benefits. These impacts can be determined with a cost–benefit analysis (CBA). On the basis of a systematic case study, this study provides a profound understanding for the methodology of the CBA and the importance for public-decision making. By means of ITS-projects of the European Framework Programs, the automotive ITS-project sim^TD and the multimodal-related project All Ways Travelling, the significance of CBA-results for ITS-projects is shown. At the same time, the method is critically assessed by showing a number of limitations that can strongly determine the validity of the results, and therefore require a methodological adaption to the needs of ITS-projects.

Business ecosystems aim to develop the capabilities of its participants through collaboration supporting new offerings, better fulfil customer requirements and eventually create new innovations. Acting in an ecosystem provides synergistic benefits to actors by increasing the total value of the output – the actors can achieve more than they would have achieved working independently. The main objective of both studied winter maintenance ecosystems, Finnish and Japanese, is to enhance safety and ensure good road conditions. These ecosystems are compared to analyse and discuss the potential ways to develop current value networks. As roads and streets are publicly owned in most cases and mobility services regarded as a public good, the role of the public sector mostly dictates the topology and ecosystem actors. In Finland, the role of the road authorities is reduced because of the restructuring of the public sector, whereas in Japan it has so far remained stronger although road authorities have enhanced cooperation with local residents. For authorities in both countries, the prevailing lack of resources for maintenance operations is a strong motivating factor for finding new, more efficient procurement and operating models. Understanding the roles of all actors involved in the winter maintenance ecosystem is essential in this search for efficiency.

Ramp metering systems on motorways in urban areas need a level of coordination, otherwise, traffic on some on-ramps has much more difficulty entering the motorway than on others. The existing rule-based algorithms are a substantial improvement over the uncoordinated case, but this way of coordination still lacks flexibility. This is because the traditional algorithms take the existing ramp metering systems as starting point, which has inherent limitations, as these systems were not designed to operate in a setting with coordination. In this study, a more fundamental approach is taken, by considering the network of a motorway segment with a small number of on-ramps, and addressing both internal performance and the role the network should play in its surrounding network. The fundamental approach has been expressed in a generic, scalable model for network management, and the quantitative hierarchical model. When this model is applied to ramp metering, it becomes easy to assign priorities to the different on-ramps and to the motorway. This way of coordinating on-ramps offers far greater flexibility to support various traffic management policies. Moreover, it offers a perspective to extend the managed area to networks of virtually any size.

This study introduces a new short-term traffic forecasting technique, based on the dynamic features of traffic data derived from vehicles moving in urban networks. The authors goal is to forecast the values of appropriate traffic status indicators such as average travel time or speed, for one or more time steps in the future until the next half hour. The proposed forecasting technique is based on road profiles generated from the application of data clustering techniques on real traffic data. Data clustering is applied after the original feature space is transformed to a new one of a significantly lower dimension. This transformation is based on the dynamic characteristics of current traffic, expressed in the form of the speed derivatives. To evaluate the proposed technique they used two-week historical data from the city of Berlin, Germany. Extensive evaluation results indicate improvement of the forecasting accuracy after comparison with a set of existing traffic forecasting techniques.

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) have been intensively studied over the past few years. Indeed, a strong strand of research is devoted to aid freight companies or public authorities in making their decisions. Nowadays, new solutions are proposed that take into account new technologies enabling the design of electric vehicles which can be used in new mobility schemes or help fleet owners stay competitive when delivering freight. In this study, the aim is to investigate the innovative concept of modular electric vehicles for goods delivery in cities. More precisely, the vehicles considered in this study can be split into two or several modules which can be let at a dedicated location and retrieved later during a run for charging purposes or to gain agility. The objective is then to address the challenging issues associated with the use of these new modular electric vehicles for urban freight transport. It is a completely new problem integrating both the complexity of the original VRP and specific constraints induced by using modular electric vehicles in urban environment. This study presents a first formulation of this problem together with a complete effective solving approach which shows promising results.

The objective of this study is to build up a common approach for the assessment of logistics innovations. Innovations are referred to here as best practices and are considered as existing approaches or solutions providing an answer to a relevant problem or challenge in freight transport. The impact evaluation of logistics innovations takes into account strategic targets, topics covered, transferability and novelty of the best practices. A freight specific multi-criteria analysis approach was designed for the evaluation process.