A method for estimating the dimensions of non-delimited free parking areas by using a static surveillance camera is proposed. The proposed method is specially designed to tackle the main challenges of urban scenarios (multiple moving objects, outdoor illumination conditions and occlusions between vehicles) with no training. The core of this work is the temporal analysis of the video frames to detect the occupancy variation of the parking areas. Two techniques are combined: background subtraction using a mixture of Gaussians to detect and track vehicles and the creation of a transience map to detect the parking and leaving of vehicles. The authors demonstrate that the proposed method yields satisfactory estimates on three real scenarios while being a low computational cost solution that can be applied in any kind of parking area covered by a single camera.

This study outlines a new two-stage multi-criteria analysis (MCA) methodology to facilitate assessing and selecting investments in intelligent transport systems (ITSs). The authors focus on ITS-based safety innovation projects (SIPs) in the realm of road transport infrastructure, namely, those conducive to more ‘forgiving roads’ and ‘self-explanatory roads’. Stakeholders interested in improving road safety can use this MCA tool to assess alternative options for improving road safety, based on how each option contributes to each stakeholder group's objectives. The preferences of each stakeholder are fully taken into account in a first stage through partial MCAs, which determine how each SIP contributes to each separate stakeholder's specific objectives. In the second stage, the preferences of all stakeholders are bundled, with more emphasis on societal preferences. This second stage analysis paradoxically allows identifying policy areas where government incentives could address strong concerns voiced by particular stakeholder groups. In other words, an implicit feedback loop is generated to the SIPs’ design, with ‘redesign’ intended to reduce the gap between societal preferences and specific-stakeholder ones, thereby increasing the probability that the support of all stakeholder groups involved could still be ascertained.

Road side units (RSUs) are considered to be one of the most important components in vehicular networks to send and receive data from other components inside the networks. Regarding the fact that vehicular network performance and vehicular environment coverage are highly related, the maximum coverage via RSUs improves the efficiency of vehicular networks. However, because of high costs of RSU placement, it would be impossible to have full coverage through RSUs. Hence, it would be necessary to optimally install a limited number of RSUs in the most appropriate locations. In this article, the problem of RSU placement is formulated to binary integer programming. The objective of the present study is to find locations which have higher impacts on efficiency of vehicular networks. The objective function is minimising the costs of RSU placement. Moreover, coverage of the most important locations by RSUs has been applied in the form of optimization constraints. The performance of the given mechanism has been assessed by real traces. Simulation results indicate that the method is able to find optimal locations of RSUs in highway and urban environments. Furthermore, the results show that by optimal RSU placement inside the environment, the performance of vehicular network is improved.

Current traffic control systems regulate traffic flows only by switching traffic lights according to historical data. Status-prediction and routing services also rely on historical data and as such the accuracy of such predictions cannot be fully relied upon. This paper models the traffic control problem as a multi-agent-multi-purpose system (MAMP) inspired by ant colony optimisation (ACO). Traffic information is collected by the vehicles, rather than fixed roadside infrastructure in this system. Moreover, the information is collected and shared among the vehicles in a distributed manner. The proposed distributed intelligent traffic system (DITS) is implemented in NetLogo and experiments are conducted on two variations of the system, one with ACO, the other without ACO to investigate the impact of ACO on the solution to the traffic problem. Three performance parameters; average speed, average waiting time of vehicles and the average number of stopped vehicles are recorded and studied for different traffic densities and road topologies. The results have shown that for various initial distributions of vehicles, the ACO-strategy obtains higher average speeds, smaller average waiting times and number of stopped vehicles than the non-ACO-strategy. This observation holds for all experiments with different traffic densities and different road network topologies.

Ultra-wide band (UWB) communication is expected to play a key role in next generation broadband intra vehicle wireless applications. The car compartment differs significantly from other well studied indoor or outdoor environments. Hence, channel sounding experiments are crucial for gaining a thorough knowledge of the UWB signal propagation characteristics in such a medium. Time domain channel sounding campaigns often employ some sort of deconvolution during measurement post processing as the measured signal in these experiments is the convolution of the channel response and the probing pulse which violates the Nyquist criterion. In this study, a comparison of two variants of time-domain serial subtractive deconvolution algorithm, popularly known as CLEAN, is presented. Appropriate statistical metrics for assessing the relative merit of a deconvolution technique are identified in the context of intra vehicle UWB transmission, and the better algorithm is selected based on its performance over a standard IEEE channel simulation testbed. The chosen method is then applied to extract power delay profile and delay parameters from an empirical time domain sounding experiment performed inside a passenger car. The effects of passenger occupancy, transmitter receiver separation and absence of direct transmission path are studied.

Infomobility systems are spreading across the world, attracting the attention of policy-makers and practitioners from a variety of industries. However, several studies have asserted that they not always are effective in improving transport systems, since they do not convey the required information to mobility managers and customers. On the basis of existing academic contributions in the transport information quality and information quality literature, this study addresses the concept of Infomobility Quality, proposing a comprehensive framework that encompasses the main quality dimensions to be considered in the design and assessment of the quality and potential effectiveness of the Infomobility system. This study aims to fill a literature gap and to provide transport system decision-makers with an instrument to develop and improve Infomobility systems.