Intelligent Cooperative Sensing for Improved traffic efficiency

Funded under: FP7-ICT-2011-8

Project reference: Grant Agreement n. 317671

Start date 1 November 2012     End date 31 December 2015

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems is the future direction of mobility. Transportation assets will be increasingly integrated and will communicate through a wireless communications system. Travellers and goods carriers will have full knowledge of system performance and will be able to plan their journeys accordingly.

The architecture of the ICT infrastructure for supporting Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is purely hierarchical, with sensed data flowing from the leaves (i.e., road-side or vehicle-installed sensors) to the root (i.e., the traffic management centre). The current approach does not scale adequately with the inclusion of a significant number of new elements, is not flexible in supporting an incremental growth or changes of the ITS, and exhibits latency and security issues.

To overcome the limitations of the current systems, we propose a new architecture where the intelligence for sensing and actuation is distributed over some of the elements, called gateways, which host a software platform for running ITS applications, using the local storage and computation capabilities available. The proposed system aims at achieving significant energy efficiency in transportation systems through faster, dependable, and more accurate sensing cycles and reactions, as enabled by the fully distributed architecture. We envisage that most noticeable reductions in the emissions of CO2 will be experienced in urban transportation systems. 

The goal of the project is to define a new architecture to enable cooperative sensing in intelligent transportation systems and to develop a reference end-to-end implementation. The project results will enable advanced traffic and travel management strategies, based on reliable and real-time input data. The effectiveness of such new strategies, together with the proposed system, will be assessed in two field trials.

The ICSI proposal is in line with the expected impact of topic ICT-2011.6.7 ''Cooperative Systems for energy efficient and sustainable mobility''of the Work Programme 2011-2012 Most of people in Europe use cars for daily transportation needs in both urban and rural environments. ICSI platform intends to provide a prototype of a European traffic monitoring and information system that could impact in a number of different ways. The impact of events on traffic conditions has not been effectively accounted, which results in inefficient guidance and management. A semi-automatic accident detection and recovery system involving the main stakeholders (motorway operator, police and emergency services) may thus contribute to more efficient guidance and management in parallel with increased safety. ICSI will produce a reference implementation of a cooperative ITS with strong innovative features with respect to conventional ITS. We identify the following beneficiaries of the ICSI results, especially at European level due to the close cooperation with the project partners and the dissemination roles played by the European Commission and the relevant European standardization bodies. In ICSI several enabling technologies will be developed whose impact is not confined to the realm of ITS. Indeed wireless communication, pervasive computing and computer vision are still emerging disciplines with a growing application range, thanks to scientific advances, echnological achievements and the reduction of costs of embedded systems. During the project lifetime, we will establish links with the most appropriate standardization bodies to push relevant results into the future releases.