Towards cooperative traffic management: An overview of the COOPERS project

COOPERS (Co-operative Systems for Intelligent Road Safety) is a 48-month Integrated Project (IP) co-funded by the European Commission (DG-Information Society and Media) in the 6th Framework Programme. 37 partners from 15 European countries are participating in COOPERS under the co-ordination of AustriaTech. The project started in February 2006 and is planned to be completed in 2010.

COOPERS is focused on the development of telematics applications on motorway infrastructures with the long term objective of ‘co-operative traffic management’ interfacing vehicles with motorway infrastructure. This contribution to enhance road safety of European motorways is the overall aim of COOPERS. In order to achieve this new safety-related services equipment and applications are defined, developed and tested.

The vision of COOPERS

COOPERS plans to connect vehicles on the motorway to the road infrastructure via continuous wireless communication. It will provide vehicles and drivers with real-time safety related information of the current traffic infrastructure status which is location-based. Infrastructure to vehicle communication (I2V) has the potential to improve traffic management while simultaneously enhancing road safety. In addition, COOPERS will apply vehicle to infrastructure communication (V2I) with vehicles used as floating sensors to collect traffic or/and road condition data to enable co-operative traffic management.

Within COOPERS, bi-directional I2V communication links are developed to realise open standardised wireless communication. Wherever possible, the concept will be built upon existing equipment and networks on the motorway infrastructure.

Why do we need infrastructure to vehicle communication?

In recent years, many R&D projects have been focused on either vehicle based ITS applications e.g. autonomous vehicle systems, or infrastructure based systems e.g. variable Message Signs, relatively few research are seen in the development of cooperative systems which is based on communication between road infrastructure and vehicles. One of the objectives of COOPERS is to reduce the gap between the vehicles and the infrastructure by dealing with the infrastructure to vehicle (I2V) communication to achieve cooperative traffic management of motorways.

This I2V communication will help to guarantee a faster exchange of the safety related information from the infrastructure to the drivers. Currently the delivery of information to the vehicle via RDS-TMC (Radio Data System – Traffic Message Channel) needs up to 10 minutes which is too long to meet the user requirements in receiving safety relevant information. In COOPERS, the goal is to reduce the time period to 30 seconds from the generation of the information within the Traffic Control Centre (TCC) to the delivery to the individual driver.

The second big advantage of co-operative traffic management is the precision of the delivered messages. With co-operative systems point locations that indicate either a point of an event (e.g. accident, end of traffic-jam) or the start and the end point for segment specific information (e.g. slippery road surface, speed limitation) can be addressed. The positioning process will be map independent to make sure that all On Board Units with map content are able to interpret the provided information. For this on-the-fly positioning process currently procedures like positioning with Agora-C are under development.

The last big advantage of using the I2V communication channel is that similar to the RDS-TMC messages a standardised and language independent message set can be used. The difference from RDS-TMC can be found in the number of messages transmitted. While TMC primary focuses on messages concerning the traffic status (e.g. traffic congestions, construction on the motorway), weather conditions (e.g. icy road surface, heavy rain) and warnings on upcoming dangerous situations (e.g. wrong way driver warning, accident warnings) co-operative services can provide additional information relevant for the specific point on the motorway. Such a specific point message can be the speed limit and/or recommended speed on the specific road section ahead. Also lane relevant information can be provided to the driver. This way the driver can be informed about the affected lanes for an upcoming construction site along the motorway. Additionally lane relevant information gives the Motorway operator the possibility to open the hard shoulder in exceptional cases if necessary.

The COOPERS approach of the permanent I2V communication link can be seen in Figure 1. Hereby the information within the car must be equivalent the information that is shown on the Variable Message Signs (VMS). In a long term vision, when all vehicles would be equipped with an I2V On-Board-Unit, the motorway operators would be able to remove the VMS-gantries and bring all relevant information directly into the car.

Areas of work in COOPERS

In COOPERS, one of the principles to develop cooperative services is to build upon existing infrastructures. However there are areas where innovative work is necessary including the development of new hardware and software. In this section, the main research areas and competences of COOPERS will be shortly described in terms of the message generation – message flow – driver information.

The traffic related messages are generated in the Traffic Control Centre (TCC) of the motorway operator. Inputs for the traffic message decision process will come on the one hand from the infrastructure sensors along the motorway (e.g. weather sensors, detection loops). The second input is from external data e.g. provided by meteorological companies and/or Floating Car Data Providers. Also historical data records (e.g. time variation curves) will help the road operator to better judge current traffic situation. Additionally the motorway operator has the possibility to verify those data by checking CCTV video images from sensible areas of the network. The data could be those which are related to the vehicle itself or its movement on the road network, e.g. GPS position and speed, or related to traffic environment detected by using on board sensors e.g. weather sensors and road surface condition sensors (e.g. ESP active).

All the data sources will help the operator to generate the relevant message for the vehicles driving on a motorway section. Co-operative traffic management enables the operator to distribute specific messages to all vehicles within one section. Hereby the transmitted information will have tactical information character relevant for the road sections ahead of the driver or strategically traffic information relevant for the whole road network in a wider content.

The message to the driver will be generated by using a language independent message set. In COOPERS, the consortium has proposed the following services to demonstrate the potential of COOPERS approach to improve road safety:

• Accident/Incident Warning
• Road/Weather Condition Warning
• Roadworks Information
• Lane Utilisation Information
• In-Vehicle Variable Speed Limit Information
• Traffic Congestion Warning
• ISA (Intelligent Speed Adaptation) with Infrastructure Link (motorway operators have to provide high reliable speed limit information directly to drivers via continuous communication between infrastructure and vehicle)
• Road Charging to Influence Demand (information of the driver on the current fee. This service offers the possibility to charge vehicles in a more flexible way)
• International Service Handover (to ensure continuity and quality of service provided for international trips)
• Route Navigation Services (here the motorway operator provides data that will improve Journey Time estimation, routing and map updating relating to motorway network)

After the generation the message is distributed to the involved drivers on the respective road segment. This road segment specific advice is sent to the drivers via I2V communication e.g. using DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast), DSRC (microwave technologies) or GSM/GPRS/UMTS. Especially for the Speed Limit Services the communication technology has to ensure that all drivers of the specific road segment get relevant and specific information in time. This has to be established by an uplink where the vehicle/driver confirms the complete transmission of the message. This issue will become relevant for services like ‘Intelligent Speed Adaptation with infrastructure link’.

Parallel to the technology development, organisational structure and the legal framework need to be adopted. Data privacy for V2I communication can be an important issue for the single driver and citizen. In COOPERS most of the vehicle related data is not needed from a single registered vehicle, but can also be anonymous as long as the message is processed quickly and accurately enough to warn following vehicles. Liability could be another issue in providing cooperative services. So it is important that the information transmitted to the vehicles needs to be stored according to a certified procedure to be able to define the roles of the single partners clearly and limit their respective liability.

How COOPERS will implement the cooperative services

In COOPERS, the following 3 steps are proposed to develop and implement cooperative services:

• Step-1. Improve road sensor infrastructure and traffic control applications for more precise situation based traffic information and driver advice. Establish a link between road tolling systems and I2V concept.
• Step-2. Development of a communication concept and applications able to cope with the I2V requirements in terms of reliability, real time capability and robustness and considering different transmission-technologies (DAB, CALM, IP based networks and standards).
• Step-3. Demonstrate results on important sections of European motorways with high density traffic in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy and develop deployment strategies for mixed environment. This step can also be seen in Figure 1.

The demonstration sites

The COOPERS concept will be validated in 3 demonstration sites which differ in their layout regarding Trans European Networks (TEN), their approach to traffic information and their targeted objectives regarding efficiency and/or safety.

The first demonstration site starts from the German city of Nürnberg and heads south to München and the Austrian border at Kufstein, passing Innsbruck and the Brennero Pass onto the Italian city of Verona. The overall distance is 500km. The demonstration will start at the beginning of 2008 and will focus on the data distribution with several communication techniques like infrared, microwave, DAB in Bavaria and maybe GPRS/UMTS as a fall back solution.

The second demonstration site will is on the Belgium/Dutch corridor between Antwerp and Rotterdam which is one of the most intensively used motorways in Europe. The communication technique to be used will be GPRS/UMTS. The demonstration will be focussed on the effects of services tested in transition period in which not all of the vehicles are fully equipped with safety systems and road infrastructure safety systems are non-homogeneously available on the international road network. The driver’s behaviour will be subject for analysis and system validation. The demonstration will also start in the beginning of 2008.

Demonstration three is in Berlin, Germany, and will focus on the city highway A100 with a total length of 24.8km. The aim is to evaluate the transmission of safety related information based on broadcast based technologies (DAB). An uplink from the vehicle to the infrastructure (currently GPRS/UMTS or WLAN technologies) is under discussion. This demonstration site will start in the mid of 2008.

At the end of the project the different communication techniques will have been tested with the defined COOPERS service set with a number of 200+ drivers. So the possibilities and limitations of the different techniques will be demonstrated. In addition the safety impact of co-operative traffic management along the European motorways will be assessed.

Further information about COOPERS project and current results can be found at www.coopers-ip.eu.

References

1. COOPERS Technical Annex I: Description of Work
2. COOPERS Deliverable 5: Summary Report on Safety Standards and Indicators to Improve the Safety on Roads