Steering Clear of Urban Jams
Traffic information has so far been confined to traffic reports spoken on the radio and to the digital channel RDS-TMC. With ideas for new navigation systems, Bosch researchers also want to guide drivers around traffic jams and obstacles in inner cities.
In this age of the automobile, the daily trip to work sometimes turns into an adventure. Especially in metropolitan areas and cities, driving can become a torment when a single broken-down vehicle causes a backup miles long and disruptions within a wide radius. The established and trusted broadcasting service for traffic information can’t record these narrowly branching traffic flows and their disruptions. It was designed only for the network of interstate and major state highways.
That’s why Bosch researchers are working on models for recording and evaluating traffic conditions in cities and metropolitan areas and conveying up-to-date traffic-routing strategies to motorists – whether through variable direction signs or directly into automobile navigation systems. In various projects of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Union, Bosch is working with automotive industry partners on concepts that will shape tomorrow’s driving.
Research is focusing on what’s known as the telematics chain. This links the collection of the traffic data, its evaluation, and strategy formation to terminal equipment via DAB or DVB-T broadcasting. One aspect of this, for example, is the geographic encoding of events. In the joint European project “Agora,” Bosch and industry partners developed a process for encoding the locations of events (georeferencing).
These events can be traffic-related, like backups or roadblocks, or they could represent additional information, such as parking garages and the number of available spaces.
In any case, the event is transmitted along with a piece of geography, a section from a digital map. Since the Agora standard is open and accessible to the public, third-party vendors can also make use of it. Navigation devices of the next generation will understand this standard, and they’ll transfer the event-plus-map information to their digital road maps by means of a map-matching procedure.
Streams of traffic can be separated, which means that a soccer fan will not only be guided to the stadium in an optimized flow of traffic; he’ll also quickly find a parking space there. On the other hand, a driver not interested in the sports match would be steered well clear of the event.
For the Agora method, Bosch researchers are trying to develop an algorithm that provides the smallest possible data record – consisting of event notification and road geometry – so that the information occupies only a small bandwidth when transmitted to the vehicle. Extrapolated to peak periods, the amount of information transmitted could easily reach 10,000 notifications per hour in metropolitan areas. These notifications can be weighted: as “acute,” for instance, when there are traffic jams or a ghost-driver on the road, as “medium-term” when space is occupied by weekly markets, or as “long-term” when a lane of traffic is closed during the summer.
The BMBF project Invent, in which Bosch is taking part, has taken on the goal of balancing out the traffic flows in metropolitan areas and, if not completely eliminating them, at least reducing the incidence of traffic jams. According to the results of studies, telematics (the totality of systems for recording traffic conditions and controlling the flow of traffic on that basis) can reduce stop-and-go traffic and traffic congestion by between four and 16 percent, which entails an accompanying increase in economic output. In the Invent project, the researchers are examining the possibilities for data collection and generation and the use of that data in vehicles, such as for calculating routes around the latest traffic jams or for services from third-party providers.
The telematics chain extending from the collection of data to its use in a vehicle is closed by the project “Global System for Telematics” (GST), in which Bosch and more than 40 European partners are participating. In the partial project “Safety Channel,” researchers are defining a transmission channel through which administrative and safety-related data such as traffic information can be broadcast. The channel is being defined without regard to the transmission method, such as digital radio, but it can easily fit into a DAB ensemble, for instance.
That’s why Bosch researchers are working on models for recording and evaluating traffic conditions in cities and metropolitan areas and conveying up-to-date traffic-routing strategies to motorists – whether through variable direction signs or directly into automobile navigation systems. In various projects of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Union, Bosch is working with automotive industry partners on concepts that will shape tomorrow’s driving.
Research is focusing on what’s known as the telematics chain. This links the collection of the traffic data, its evaluation, and strategy formation to terminal equipment via DAB or DVB-T broadcasting. One aspect of this, for example, is the geographic encoding of events. In the joint European project “Agora,” Bosch and industry partners developed a process for encoding the locations of events (georeferencing).
These events can be traffic-related, like backups or roadblocks, or they could represent additional information, such as parking garages and the number of available spaces.
In any case, the event is transmitted along with a piece of geography, a section from a digital map. Since the Agora standard is open and accessible to the public, third-party vendors can also make use of it. Navigation devices of the next generation will understand this standard, and they’ll transfer the event-plus-map information to their digital road maps by means of a map-matching procedure.
Streams of traffic can be separated, which means that a soccer fan will not only be guided to the stadium in an optimized flow of traffic; he’ll also quickly find a parking space there. On the other hand, a driver not interested in the sports match would be steered well clear of the event.
For the Agora method, Bosch researchers are trying to develop an algorithm that provides the smallest possible data record – consisting of event notification and road geometry – so that the information occupies only a small bandwidth when transmitted to the vehicle. Extrapolated to peak periods, the amount of information transmitted could easily reach 10,000 notifications per hour in metropolitan areas. These notifications can be weighted: as “acute,” for instance, when there are traffic jams or a ghost-driver on the road, as “medium-term” when space is occupied by weekly markets, or as “long-term” when a lane of traffic is closed during the summer.
The BMBF project Invent, in which Bosch is taking part, has taken on the goal of balancing out the traffic flows in metropolitan areas and, if not completely eliminating them, at least reducing the incidence of traffic jams. According to the results of studies, telematics (the totality of systems for recording traffic conditions and controlling the flow of traffic on that basis) can reduce stop-and-go traffic and traffic congestion by between four and 16 percent, which entails an accompanying increase in economic output. In the Invent project, the researchers are examining the possibilities for data collection and generation and the use of that data in vehicles, such as for calculating routes around the latest traffic jams or for services from third-party providers.
The telematics chain extending from the collection of data to its use in a vehicle is closed by the project “Global System for Telematics” (GST), in which Bosch and more than 40 European partners are participating. In the partial project “Safety Channel,” researchers are defining a transmission channel through which administrative and safety-related data such as traffic information can be broadcast. The channel is being defined without regard to the transmission method, such as digital radio, but it can easily fit into a DAB ensemble, for instance.
