Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Signal MAnagement in Real Time for urban traffic NETworkS

Objectif

SMART NETS aims at enabling a significant improvement of the international state-of-the-art in real-time network-wide urban traffic control via application, demonstration, and comparative evaluation of the new-generation control strategy TUC (Traffic-responsive Urban Control). TUC employs advanced automatic control methodologies which may lead to improvements in the order of 40% of journey times as compared to fixed-time settings under saturated traffic conditions where all current signal control strategies are known to perform poorly. Within SMART NETS, TUC will be extended to consider public transport priority measures. The demonstration will be conducted in extended network parts of Southampton, Munich and Chania, and include field-comparisons with the current resident control methods (SCOOT, BALANCE, TASS). A successful completion of SMART NETS would mark a new era in urban traffic control worldwide, with substantial technological and economic impact for European ITS activities.

Work description:
All current signal control strategies are known to be functionally decentralised and to perform poorly under saturated traffic conditions. TUC is genuinely network-wide and has been conceived to address traffic saturation in a highly efficient and elegant way. TUC is, at the same time, simpler than any other strategy and may be easily applied to any network via implementation of a generic software code, whereby the specifics of each application are incorporated in suitable input files to feed the software code.
In a first project phase, TUC's control law will be designed in detail for each application site and will be exhaustively tested via simulation for various scenarios of demand, incidents, device failures etc. In parallel, public transport priority measures will be incorporated in TUC. Then, TUC will be implemented and demonstrated in each of the three cities over seven months, with weekly alternation of TUC and the current resident state-of-the-art signal control strategy (SCOOT, BALANCE, TASS respectively), to enable data collection under all occurring traffic conditions. Finally, the collected data will be used for the evaluation of TUC against the resident strategies. The evaluation will provide conclusive evidence on TUC's capabilities with regard to both quantitative (journey times, saturation levels, fuel consumption, cost-benefit ratio etc.) and qualitative criteria (simplicity, interoperability, user acceptance etc.). The targeted end result is a field-demonstrated breakthrough in terms of efficiency in saturated traffic conditions.
Ten cities, five of them Capitals, are included in the project as Followers to form a User Board and to receive privileged information on the achieved results. Further activities will ensure wider dissemination of the project results including both scientific publications and information for city officers, for instance through the POLIS network.

Milestones:
Main milestones are the design and simulation testing of TUC for the three sites; the inclusion of public transport priority in TUC; the field implementation and verification of the strategy in three sites; the field-demonstration, assessment, and comparative evaluation. Main expected result is the extended and conclusive field evidence of a breakthrough in the area of urban traffic control with targeted reduction of average journey times in the order of 40% under saturated traffic conditions.

Appel à propositions

Data not available

Régime de financement

DEM - Demonstration contracts

Coordinateur

NAPIER UNIVERSITY
Contribution de l’UE
Aucune donnée
Adresse
129 COLINTON ROAD
EH14 1DJ EDINBURGH
Royaume-Uni

Voir sur la carte

Coût total
Aucune donnée

Participants (9)