The vision of DIT4TraM is to support the transition to seamless and sustainable, connected, and autonomous mobility by disentangling the system components to the greatest extent possible, yet ensuring sufficient cooperation and - possibly emergent - coordination by smart system design, leading to increased liveability, safety, resilience, efficiency, as well as privacy, participation, fairness, and sustainability on all urban scales.
In achieving its vision, DIT4TraM will:
1. provide the theoretical foundations, algorithms, a software platform, and six pilots (four real-life and two virtual pilots) of different types of applications that can be used by a broad group of target users, such as road authorities, municipalities, and ICT companies;
2. consider each relevant aspect (or level) of the operation of the transport system (i.e. connected con-trol of the vehicle, management of the traffic flows, management of the multi-modal traveller demand and cooperation in multi-actors setting) and all relevant modes (car, active modes, traditional public transport, and novel - shared, pool, demand-responsive - services);
3. deliver insights into the impacts of the proposed distributed multi-modal and multi-level traffic and mobility management system, the technical requirements (including data needs), costs, etc., allowing policy makers to make the appropriate investment decisions;
4. use beyond state-of-the-art methods in distributed intelligence, which reduces considerably the complexity of multi-scale optimisation problems, but also ensures the highest level of (data-) security since data is kept at the level where it is needed and not shared if not.
Our vision of a seamless and sustainable, connected and autonomous urban mobility is enabled by cooperative and decentralised traffic management. DIT4TRaM’s overall objective is to develop, implement, and test a generic distributed control paradigm applicable at the level of traffic operations, mobility management, demand-supply synchronisation and shared mobility. This paradigm aims to employ novel and often disruptive technologies to solve pressing mobility issues (congestion, liveability, sustainability, equity). It includes advanced monitoring, estimation and (machine learning) forecasting technology, and associated algorithms for a variety of novel multi-modal management and mobility concepts operating at all urban (or even regional) scales.
