Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INFRAMIX (Road Infrastructure ready for mixed vehicle traffic flows)

Teaser

The INFRAMIX project targets to design, upgrade and adapt both physical and digital elements of the road infrastructure, ensuring an uninterrupted, safe and efficient traffic in the transition period with automated and conventional vehicles. This also includes ways of...

Summary

The INFRAMIX project targets to design, upgrade and adapt both physical and digital elements of the road infrastructure, ensuring an uninterrupted, safe and efficient traffic in the transition period with automated and conventional vehicles. This also includes ways of informing all types of vehicles about the road operator’s control commands and proposing new visual signs and electronic signals. INFRAMIX ensures that the proposed adaptations will not jeopardize safety, quality of service and efficiency. In order to achieve this, INFRAMIX will:
- Develop a co-simulation environment, combining the modelling of the vehicle behaviour with the traffic simulation to examine different mixed traffic scenarios;
- Design and implement novel traffic estimation, monitoring and control strategies;
- Develop hybrid testing systems, coupling infrastructure elements and vehicles on real roads with virtual traffic environment;
- Evaluate traffic safety and user’s appreciation;
- Create a Road Infrastructure Classification Scheme.
To achieve its objectives, INFRAMIX selects a bottom-up approach. It builds on three specific high value (in terms of importance for traffic efficiency and safety) traffic scenarios:
- Dynamic lane assignment to automated driving: The assignment of a dedicated lane to automated traffic is expected to reduce the safety concerns around the penetration of the automated vehicles to conventional traffic.
- Roadworks zones are major safety hotspots with many accidents both for vehicles and for the staff on site. They pose interesting challenges for efficient coordination of mixed traffic flows, where the infrastructure should help the vehicles by providing extended information in real-time.
- Bottlenecks: The scope is to investigate real-me controllers, involving a variety of control measures, such as dynamic speed limits, merge assistance and ramp metering, to manage mixed traffic situations in front of bottlenecks of various kinds (onramps, off-ramps, lane drops, tunnels, bridges, sags) and avoid traffic flow degradation.
Two test sites are being developed:
- The Spanish test site is located within the Mediterranean Corridor between Barcelona and the French border. The specific highway segment is over 20km of four-lane carriageway. The currently available ITS equipment includes different types of VMS, video cameras, Bluetooth antennas, and magnetic sensors for measuring occupancy and 1 weather station. ITS-G5 short range communication and cellular communication are available at the test-site, and a proprietary Fibre Optic ring network with 10 Gb Bandwidth connects all the equipment from the test-site to the TMC in real-time.
- The Austrian Test Site includes about 20km of A2 motorway between Laßnitzhöhe and City of Graz. The test site is equipped with gantries, mobile VMS like roadworks warning equipment, ITS-G5 RSUs, video cameras (traffic management, single vehicle detection), single-vehicle counters, environmental sensors and radar detection. It enables testing of newly developed visual information, ITS-G5 short-range communication, cellular communication and real-time communication with the traffic control centre.
INFRAMIX expected impact: to prepare the European road network for automation through targeted interventions both physical and digital. This is even more important for the long transition period where we expect a step-by-step introduction of automation and mixed traffic on roads with different capabilities and installed equipment. In this respect, INFRAMIX is expected to have an important impact, as it will deliver specific solutions with tangible integrated interventions, both physical and digital. The interventions will be adaptable and incremental to cope with a variety of existing infrastructure (old, new, etc.) and diverse traffic scenarios (percentage of automated vehicles, of connected vehicles etc.).

Work performed

During the first 18 months of the project, the activities have been focused on the definition of the overall framework INFRAMIX in terms of use cases, requirements, technical architecture, simulation tools, integration and test site construction, evaluation plan and path to exploitation. (Please refer to www.inframix.eu/public-deliverables/ for additional details on the deliverables). In detail:
- The Status quo analysis goes from target traffic scenarios and their use cases to the definition of functional, feasibility and non-functional requirements. The analysis covers also traffic simulation tools and outlines also a high-level project architecture, defining the INFRAMIX components and their interactions. (Deliverable D2.1)
- A detailed architecture for coupling VSimRTI and ICOS (via the ICOS-Ambassador) was designed. The interfaces for this coupling have been defined and the parameters and measurements to be transmitted via this interface have been specified. A basic scenario has been set up and the implementations have been tested. (Deliverable D2.2)
- The preparation of the hybrid testing has been executed, working on the requirements and collection of additional issues. An advanced test scenario in Graz (closed Austrian Test site) for further integration is being set up.
- Concerning the Advanced microscopic traffic flow modelling for automated driving, the implementation of infrastructure components such as VMS and sensors has been finished. A 3D visualization of the simulation is available, and a video capture has been prepared.
- Regarding the estimation for mixed vehicle traffic, algorithms of the traffic estimation have been developed, tuned, tested and integrated into the co-simulation environment.
- Traffic control strategies have been designed, tested and evaluated and an architecture for embedding external code into VSimRTI has been prepared.
- From these results, an INFRAMIX system-architecture has been defined, including a full communication concept.
- Concerning integration of INFRAMIX components, during the first half of the project, the methodology for demonstrations and testing has been completed (Deliverable D4.1)
- The assessment of the INFRAMIX developments includes the so-called hybrid road infrastructure, distinguishing three evaluation domains: user’s appreciation, traffic safety and efficiency. (Deliverable D5.1)
- A first version of the INFRAMIX exploitation plan has been already delivered.

Final results

The expected key results of INFRAMIX are as follows:
- Road infrastructure for mixed traffic:
o New traffic signs for mixed traffic.
o Novel traffic monitoring recommendations (wireless messages extensions).
- Infrastructure Classification Scheme:
o Indication of a simple classification scheme, similar to SAE levels for the automated vehicle capabilities, defining different levels of infrastructure support and describing the interaction with different ODDs
o A guide of how to upgrade incrementally road infrastructure to avoid stranded investments.
- Simulation platform:
o Investigation of several cases with safety critical impact.
o Testing of innovative traffic control algorithms:
- With increased traffic densities in exceptional conditions.
- With different rates of conventional and automated vehicles.
- Hybrid testing system:
o Testing of new developments of connected and automated driving.
o Testing of newly developed INFRAMIX messages
o Emulation of critical traffic situation in a safe artificial environment.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.inframix.eu.