Introduction to iTETRIS
The most important question raised today by road authorities is: how can the actual worth of investment and effectiveness of traffic engineering applications on city road traffic be estimated? The European Commission estimates that road traffic congestion costs Europe around E50 billion per year, or 0.5% of community GDP, and this is expected to increase to 1% by 2010. The majority of European citizens live in urban areas where there is increasing demand for mobility of people and goods. Given that urban environments do not generally allow for building additional roads to deal with this situation, wireless vehicular cooperative systems are an attractive solution to improve road traffic management. V2V/V2I communication technologies can improve traffic management through real-time exchange of traffic information (RTTI). However, before cooperative ITS systems are widely deployed and evaluated in field operational tests (FOTs), road authorities need clear evidence at city level of the benefits and impact of these solutions for their own particular scenarios.
The iTETRIS project has set out to satisfy this need through the development of an open, ETSI standard, compliant, and flexible simulation platform that will create close collaboration between engineering companies, road authorities, and communications experts, and enable them to develop adequate solutions for the key issues of cooperative ITS. How does cooperative ITS contribute to traffic policy objectives satisfaction? Under which conditions is cooperative ITS more effective and better performing? Which traffic management strategies for public transportation and freight management should be considered? Which are the most suitable communications technologies to support the cooperative ITS traffic management applications? How would low penetration rates be effectively handled? How is it possible to assess traffic management policy portability across cities?
To meet this aim, iTETRIS integrates wireless communications and road traffic simulation platforms in an environment that is easily tailored to specific situations allowing performance analysis of cooperative ITS at city level. Engineered for collaboration, it enables each stakeholder of a cooperative ITS project to benefit from functionalities exposed through open interfaces and to provide others with its own expertise. The accuracy and scale of the simulations leveraged by iTETRIS reveal the impact of traffic engineering on city road traffic efficiency, operational strategy, and communications interoperability. Therefore, quantifiable results of city level deployment and investment on cooperative ITS applications can be presented to road authorities.
