Search Results (16)

Horizontal dilution of precision (HDOP) is a widely used quality indicator of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning, considering only satellite geometry. In this study, HDOP was simulated using GNSS almanacs and high-resolution digital surface models (DSMs) along three European road sections: Oslo— Svinesund Bridge (Norway); Hamburg city center (Germany); and Rotterdam—Dutch–German border (Netherlands). This study was accomplished as part of the MODI project, which is a cross-border initiative to accelerate Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM). Our analysis revealed excellent or good overall GNSS performance in the study areas, particularly on highway sections with 99–100% of study points having a median HDOP that is categorized as excellent (HDOP < 2) or good (HDOP < 5). However, the road section in Hamburg’s city center presents challenges. When GPS is used alone, 8% of the study points experience weak or poor HDOP, and there are study points where the system is available (HDOP < 5) less than 50% of the time. Combining GNSS constellations significantly improved system availability, reaching 95% for 99% of the study points in Hamburg. To validate our simulations, we compared results with GNSS observations from a survey vehicle in Hamburg. Initial low correlation was attributed to the reception of signals from non-line-of-sight satellites. By excluding satellites with low signal-to-noise ratios, the correlation increased significantly, and reasonable agreement was obtained. We also examined the impact of using a 10 m DSM instead of a 1 m DSM in Hamburg. While the coarser spatial resolution offers computational benefits, it may miss critical details for accurate assessment of satellite visibility. Full article

Today’s urban environments are complex, highly congested traffic scenarios that suffer from multiple unsolved problems such as traffic jams and congestion. These problems pose a significant increase in the risks and probability of traffic accidents in modern cities, which have experienced an enormous growth in the number of vehicles. This work introduces a centralized arbitration framework designed for Cooperative Connected Automated Vehicles (CCAVs) to make real-time decisions and resolve conflicts among various driving strategies or behaviors to facilitate resource reservation based on their collaborative actions. Cooperation and arbitration are two of the most important areas of research that seek to provide tools and mechanisms for the optimization and control of traffic flow at critical locations such as intersections and traffic circles. The approach presented, fully implemented on ROS and capable of constructing a software-defined traffic control environment, is able to supervise in a distributed manner how any CCAV operates with the infrastructure, potentially reducing the number of vehicles waiting and harmonizing the traffic flow. The methodology proposed surpasses traditional driver-in-the-loop cooperation by delivering a higher level of automation for collaborative traffic behavior. This approach demonstrably reduces average waiting time by 13% and increases the total utilization of the traffic emplacement by 70% compared to the classic simulated traffic light model. The solution presented was tested on the Carla simulator, with a complete ROS-based vehicle automation solution that provides promising results for CCAV coordination in complex traffic scenarios through a general framework of behavior-based collaboration. Full article

Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) is set to play a key role in the future of transportation, contributing to the achievement of sustainable development goals. Moreover, Artificial Intelligence (AI), a transformative technology with applications across various industries, can significantly enhance CCAM operations. Additionally, passenger demand forecasting, a critical aspect of mobility research, will become even more essential as CCAM adoption continues to grow in the next years. Therefore, the present research study, in order to deal with the issue of passenger demand forecasting in CCAM, proposes the Principal Component Random Forest (PCRF) methodology, which is based on AI, as it leverages a well-established statistical methodology such as the Principal Components Analysis with a flagship traditional machine learning technique, which is Random Forest. The application of PCRF in four European pilot sites within the European Union-funded SHOW project demonstrated its high accuracy and effectiveness as reflected by the average normalized error of approximately 15%. Full article

Background: With urban logistics facing challenges such as high delivery volumes and driver shortages, autonomous driving emerges as a promising solution. However, the integration of autonomous vans and robots into existing fulfillment processes and platforms remains largely unexplored. Method: This paper addresses this gap by developing and piloting a comprehensive blueprint architecture tailored for autonomous mobility in urban last-mile delivery. The proposed framework integrates autonomous vehicle operations, data processing, and stakeholder collaboration. Results: Through initial implementation and piloting, we demonstrate the practical applicability and advantages of this architecture. Conclusions: This study contributes to the understanding of essential data, services, and tools, providing a valuable guideline for Logistics Service Providers aiming to implement autonomous last-mile delivery solutions. Full article

Nowadays, traffic management challenges in the era of digital transport are rising, as the interactions of various stakeholders providing such technologies play a pivotal role in shaping traffic dynamics. The objective of this paper was to present a game-theory-based framework for modeling and optimizing urban traffic in road networks, considering the co-existence and interactions of different players composed of drivers of conventional vehicles, central governing authorities with traffic management capabilities, and competitive or cooperative connected mobility private service providers. The scope of this work was to explore and present the outcomes of diverse mixed equilibrium conditions in the road network of the city of Thessaloniki (Greece), integrating the principles of user equilibrium, system optimum, and Cournot oligopoly. The impacts of varying network attributes were systematically analyzed to provide quantitative indicators representing the overall network performance. Analysis of the results provided insights into the sensitivity and the resilience of the road network under various prevalence schemes of drivers of conventional vehicles, representing the user equilibrium characteristics, or drivers relying on traffic guidance provided by a central governing authority, representing the system optimum principles as well as the cooperation and competition schemes of private connected mobility providers with certain market shares in the network. Full article

This paper examines the impact of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications on vehicle cooperation, focusing on increasing the robustness and feasibility of Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Vehicles (CCAVs). V2X communications enable CCAVs to obtain a holistic environmental perception, facilitating informed decision making regarding their trajectory. This technological innovation is essential to mitigate accidents resulting from inadequate or absent communication on the roads. As the importance of vehicle cooperation grows, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has been standardizing messages and services for V2X communications, in order to improve the synchronization of CCAVs actions. In this context, this preliminary work explores the use of Maneuver Coordination Messages (MCMs), under standardization by ETSI, for cooperative path planning. This work presents a novel approach by implementing these messages as well as the associated Maneuver Coordination Service (MCS) with a Cooperative Driving System to process maneuver coordination. Additionally, a trajectory approach is introduced along with a message generation mechanism and a process to dynamically handle collisions. This was implemented in an Artery V2X simulation framework combining both network communications and SUMO traffic simulations. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of using V2X communications to ensure the safety and efficiency of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS). Full article

Population growth and environmental burden have turned the efforts of cities globally toward smarter and greener mobility. Cooperative and Connected Automated Mobility (CCAM) serves as a concept with the power and potential to help achieve these goals building on technological fields like Internet of Things, computer vision, and distributed computing. However, its implementation is hindered by various challenges covering technical parameters such as performance and reliability in tandem with other issues, such as safety, accountability, and trust. To overcome these issues, new distributed and decentralized approaches like blockchain and smart contracts are needed. This paper identifies a comprehensive inventory of CCAM challenges including technical, social, and ethical challenges. It then describes the most prominent methodologies using blockchain and smart contracts to address them. A comparative analysis of the findings follows, to draw useful conclusions and discuss future directions in CCAM and relevant blockchain applications. The paper contributes to intelligent transportation systems’ research by offering an integrated view of the difficulties in substantiating CCAM and providing insights on the most popular blockchain and smart contract technologies that tackle them. Full article

The cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM) infrastructure plays a key role in understanding and enhancing the environmental perception of autonomous vehicles (AVs) driving in complex urban settings. However, the deployment of CCAM infrastructure necessitates the efficient selection of the computational processing layer and deployment of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to achieve greater performance of AVs in complex urban environments. In this paper, we propose a computational framework and analyze the effectiveness of a custom-trained DL model (YOLOv8) when deployed in diverse devices and settings at the vehicle-edge-cloud-layered architecture. Our main focus is to understand the interplay and relationship between the DL model’s accuracy and execution time during deployment at the layered framework. Therefore, we investigate the trade-offs between accuracy and time by the deployment process of the YOLOv8 model over each layer of the computational framework. We consider the CCAM infrastructures, i.e., sensory devices, computation, and communication at each layer. The findings reveal that the performance metrics results (e.g., 0.842 mAP@0.5) of deployed DL models remain consistent regardless of the device type across any layer of the framework. However, we observe that inference times for object detection tasks tend to decrease when the DL model is subjected to different environmental conditions. For instance, the Jetson AGX (non-GPU) outperforms the Raspberry Pi (non-GPU) by reducing inference time by 72%, whereas the Jetson AGX Xavier (GPU) outperforms the Jetson AGX ARMv8 (non-GPU) by reducing inference time by 90%. A complete average time comparison analysis for the transfer time, preprocess time, and total time of devices Apple M2 Max, Intel Xeon, Tesla T4, NVIDIA A100, Tesla V100, etc., is provided in the paper. Our findings direct the researchers and practitioners to select the most appropriate device type and environment for the deployment of DL models required for production. Full article

The rapid integration of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) into modern transportation systems necessitates a robust and systematic approach to assess the quality of the underlying digital infrastructure. In the presented work, we propose a methodology and evaluation of framework that can be used to assess digital infrastructure segments based on their readiness for the deployment of CAVs. The methodology encompasses a comprehensive framework that collects, processes, and evaluates diverse data sources, including real-time traffic, communication, and environmental data. The proposed framework is developed based on experimental data and provides a systematic approach to assess infrastructure readiness for CAVs. The proposed methodology is applied in a system for detecting the readiness status of digital infrastructure from a Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) perspective. The system can determine the percentage of non-compliance of technical service requirements in terms of latency, bandwidth, and localization accuracy. Thanks to this, we can determine in advance in which state the current digital infrastructure is and which services can be currently operated, and thus locate the segments of the route in which the telecommunication systems need to be supported. Full article

To mitigate road-related problems such as safety and traffic congestion, the evolution towards cooperative communicating technologies and autonomous systems is considered a solution to overcome human physical limitations and the limited perception horizon of on-board sensors. This paper describes the implementation of the Collective Perception Service (CPS) in a real road infrastructure with the goal of providing information to automated vehicles and to a central road operator. The Collective Perception Messages are built by retrieving information from traffic classification radars for local dissemination using ITS-G5 radio technology and for broader access by disseminating the messages into a central entity. The service is improved by applying some rules for optimizing the message dissemination in order to increase radio channel efficiency. The results of the experimental tests showed that the end-to-end delay between the production event of the Collective Perception Message (CPM) and the reception by other ITS stations is within the boundaries defined by ETSI standards. Moreover, the algorithm for message dissemination also shows improvement in the radio channel efficiency by limiting the number of objects disseminated by CPM messages. The developed Collective Perception Service and the road infrastructure are, therefore, a valuable asset to provide useful information for increasing road safety and fostering the deployment of Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) applications. Full article

V2X communication plays an important role in the transition towards connected, cooperative, automated driving. Wireless communication enables instant information exchange between vehicles (V2V) to support, e.g., platooning, and between the infrastructure and vehicles (I2V) to inform vehicles on, e.g., the local speed limit information or the approach of an accident location. In the Horizon 2020 HEADSTART project, we have shown how to test V2V communication in a scenario-based safety assessment framework. Safety assessment aims to determine the impact on safety in the case of potentially critical scenarios, e.g., due to, or in parallel to deterioration of communication. In this study, we extend this methodology with the incorporation of I2V communication. The developed method allows us to treat V2V and I2V communication independently. We demonstrate the method in the use case of an Intelligent Speed Adaptation I2V-functionality for platooning trucks. The practical implementation of test descriptions that consider the potential deterioration of communication signals in the standardized OpenSCENARIO format is shown. The study illustrates how tests are performed in a hardware-in-the-loop setup specifically developed for testing platooning functions. The availability of a test method that is capable of dealing with V2X communication is an important step towards the implementation of type approval methods for Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) systems. Full article

In the upcoming decade and beyond, the Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) initiative will play a huge role in increasing road safety, traffic efficiency and comfort of driving in Europe. While several individual vehicular wireless communication technologies exist, there is still a lack of real flexible and modular platforms that can support the need for hybrid communication. In this paper, we propose a novel vehicular communication management framework (CAMINO), which incorporates flexible support for both short-range direct and long-range cellular technologies and offers built-in Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems’ (C-ITS) services for experimental validation in real-life settings. Moreover, integration with vehicle and infrastructure sensors/actuators and external services is enabled using a Distributed Uniform Streaming (DUST) framework. The framework is implemented and evaluated in the Smart Highway test site for two targeted use cases, proofing the functional operation in realistic environments. The flexibility and the modular architecture of the hybrid CAMINO framework offers valuable research potential in the field of vehicular communications and CCAM services and can enable cross-technology vehicular connectivity. Full article

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications enable real-time information exchange between vehicles and infrastructure, which extends the perception range of vehicles beyond the limits of on-board sensors and, thus, facilitating the realisation of cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM) services that will improve road safety and traffic efficiency. In the context of CCAM, the successful deployments of cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) use cases, with the integration of advanced wireless communication technologies, are effectively leading to make transport safer and more efficient. However, the evaluation of multi-vendor and multi-protocol based CCAM service architectures can become challenging and complex. Additionally, conducting on-demand field trials of such architectures with real vehicles involved is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In order to overcome these obstacles, in this paper, we present the development of a standards-compliant experimental vehicular on-board unit (OBU) that supports the integration of multiple V2X protocols from different vendors to communicate with heterogeneous cloud-based services that are offered by several original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). We experimentally demonstrate the functionalities of the OBU in a real-world deployment of a cooperative collision avoidance service infrastructure that is based on edge and cloud servers. In addition, we measure end-to-end application-level latencies of multi-protocol supported V2X information flows to show the effectiveness of interoperability in V2X communications between different vehicle OEMs. Full article

Europe’s aging transportation infrastructure requires optimized maintenance programs. However, data and monitoring systems may not be readily available to support strategic decisions or they may require costly installations in terms of time and labor requirements. In recent years, the possibility of monitoring bridges by indirectly sensing relevant parameters from traveling vehicles has emerged—an approach that would allow for the elimination of the costly installation of sensors and monitoring campaigns. The advantages of cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM), which is expected to become a reality in Europe towards the end of this decade, should therefore be considered for the future development of iSHM strategies. A critical review of methods and strategies for CCAM, including Intelligent Transportation Systems, is a prerequisite for moving towards the goal of identifying the synergies between CCAM and civil infrastructures, in line with future developments in vehicle automation. This study presents the policy framework of CCAM in Europe and discusses the policy enablers and bottlenecks of using CCAM in the drive-by monitoring of transport infrastructure. It also highlights the current direction of research within the iSHM paradigm towards the identification of technologies and methods that could benefit from the use of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). Full article

The vision of cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) across Europe can only be realized when harmonized solutions that support cross-border traffic exist. The possibility of providing CCAM services along different countries when vehicles drive across various national borders has a huge innovative business potential. However, the seamless provision of connectivity and the uninterrupted delivery of services along borders also poses interesting technical challenges. The situation is particularly innovative given the multi-country, multi-operator, multi-telco-vendor, and multi-car-manufacturer scenario of any cross-border layout. This paper introduces the challenges associated to a cross-border deployment of communication technologies through the analysis of three use cases: tele-operated driving, high-definition map generation and distribution for autonomous vehicles, and anticipated cooperative collision avoidance. Furthermore, a set of 5G solutions have been identified to ensure that CCAM services can be supported efficiently in cross-border scenarios. Faster handover of a data connection from one operator to another, generalized inter-mobile edge computing (MEC) coordination, and quality of service (QoS) prediction are some of the solutions that have been introduced to reduce the uncertainties of a real 5G cross-border deployment. Full article