Coordination for Efficient and Green Urban Mobility

Project Information

CEGUM

Grant agreement ID: 845948

DOI

10.3030/845948

Project terminated on 15 September 2020

EC signature date 2 May 2019

Start date 1 June 2019

End date 31 May 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 214 158,72

EU contribution

€ 214 158,72

Coordinated by

NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CEGUM (Coordination for Efficient and Green Urban Mobility)

Reporting period: 2019-06-01 to 2021-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Nowadays, urban traffic congestion has become a permanent part of life in big cities. In addition to the negative environmental effects of traffic congestion and immense financial costs due to delays and the increase in fuel consumption, the life quality of individuals is influenced due to e.g. stress, and idle time behind red traffic lights. Congestion may also effect the safety by increasing the risk of accidents. As a remedy, methodological improvements along with advanced technological developments in communication systems, driver assistance systems, and also automated vehicles have turned the spotlight on more efficient use of the existing infrastructure. In the literature, this issue has been tackled independently from two different points of view, corresponding to two main players with a key role for mobility in urban networks: traffic lights and vehicles. Traffic signals serve the overall traffic flow efficiency while driver-assistance systems in vehicles serve the individual drivers’ interests. The aim of this project was to make traffic lights and vehicles work together and Coordinate for Efficient and Green Urban Mobility (CEGUM).

By offering a balanced trade-off between system- and user-optimum, CEGUM targets safer and faster mobility in cities with lower fuel consumption, less air pollution and less frustration for the European citizens due to reducing the idle-time behind the red lights.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The main scientific contribution of this project so far is developing an appropriate control framework for coordinating both the traffic lights and the speed of the vehicles approaching an intersection in several movements. Such control framework should be able to take into account the computational complexity of the problem. Motivated by this fact, we proposed a decomposition technique to formulate the optimization problem.

The main achievement of the current stage of the project is this two-level agent-based solution. In the lower level, the trajectories of vehicles parametrised by the infrastructures’ timing will be optimized in each movement traveling toward the intersection. These parametrized trajectories will be fed to the upper level, where along with the constraints on the infrastructures’ scheduling, will be integrated into an optimization problem and solved using tools form parametric optimization. The product of the upper level, which is the optimized timing of the infrastructure, will be fed back to the lower level to determine the optimal trajectory of vehicles. With such decomposition, the coordination between infrastructure and vehicles moving in various directions is achieved while the computational complexity of the problem is addressed properly.

Simulation results confirm that having this coordination will reduce travel time and obviate the unnecessary acceleration and deceleration of vehicles which itself can save fuel consumption.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Although only the first part of the proposal has been investigated due to the truncated duration of the project, the results are still very encouraging. It is a testimony to the importance of integrating vehicles and infrastructures together for a more efficient and green transportation in cities. Moreover, due to the urge and also competition for use of more and more sophisticated driver-assistance systems by all car-manufacturers around the world, the idea and results of CEGUM should be of great interest for this sector to have a negotiation with municipalities (or other entities involved) for making vehicles-infrastructure coordinations feasible. This change in thinking could have significant implications for current transport policies in cities.

A scenario where agents including traffic lights and vehicles in all movements coordinate