SIEMENS

Fritz Kasslatter has been trying to outrun traffic lights for weeks. The idea is to go through the numerous lights on the route he takes every day without having to stop or brake even once. Today, he has no problem doing so. He sees a red light ahead and eases off the gas – but just at that moment, the light turns green as if by magic and Kasslatter begins to smile. It’s worked again! Kasslatter hasn’t had to stop for a light once.

His ability to move so smoothly through Vienna, a metro area with 2.4 million people, has nothing to do with weeks of practice or a good sense of timing, however. Instead, Kasslatter has a small digital assistant that continually provides him with important information on the current traffic situation. At first glance, the monitor on his windshield looks like an ordinary navigation device, as it displays the vehicle’s position, selected route, estimated arrival time, and the remaining distance. But when his car approaches a traffic light, a digital speedometer suddenly appears on the screen and a female voice says: “Phased green lights at 50 kilometers per hour,” or, “red light is about to switch to green.” The unit is like a virtual passenger who only speaks when the situation requires it, in which case it gives helpful and precise instructions. All Kasslatter has to do now is adjust his speed in order to ensure he won’t see a red light for the entire length of his trip.

The secret behind this seemingly all-knowing device is a system that consists of hundreds of cameras and sensors, some of which are embedded in the road as induction loops. Here, they collect a huge amount of data. The sensors can determine how many vehicles are on the road, how fast they’re traveling, where traffic jams or backups have formed, the locations of obstacles, what condition the road is in – for instance, if there is a risk of hydroplaning, or if oil or black ice are on the road – and when traffic lights will change.

The sensors were installed as part of the “Testfeld Telematik” project, which has the backing of 14 partner organizations and covers a roughly 45-kilometer trial route in Vienna. The project’s goal is to help lay the groundwork for the future of mobility by examining ways to make driving in major cities safer, more efficient, and more comfortable. The project’s partners believe such a mobility system can only be implemented if all vehicles and infrastructure can communicate with one another. Kasslatter is a project test driver who works at Siemens’ global Corporate Technology (CT) department in Austria, where he is responsible for wireless communication. “We need to collate all the information floating around out there on our roads and communicate it to vehicles,” he says.

Real Time Traffic Information. For the 2012 ITS World Congress in Vienna, CT researchers and staff at Siemens’ Mobility and Logistics Division developed a telematics demonstration system for highways, traffic light communication, and in-vehicle reception. The first of a total of 100 drivers began testing the system in private vehicles in Vienna in February 2013. The drivers applied to participate in the trials; those accepted were issued a specially-equipped navigation device. An additional 3,000 individuals will be given a free app that has been developed for use with the most common smartphone models. The project’s partners will begin publishing the results of the trials after the project ends in June 2013.

“Car2X communication” is the term used by experts to describe the exchange of information between all road users, whereby “car” also refers to trucks, motorcycles, and vans. “X” stands for both other vehicles and traffic infrastructure, such as traffic lights and signs. The data collected in Vienna is sent to a control center managed by ASFINAG, a project partner and the company that operates Austria’s highway network. The system’s large number of data collectors ensures that monitors at the control center always display the latest information on the traffic situation. While cameras deliver images and sensors monitor weather and road conditions, information is also received on park-and-ride parking space availability, public transportation departure times and service interruptions.

All of this data is used to make driving safer and more environmentally compatible – through a reduction in the number of accidents, smoother traffic flows, and lower exhaust gas emissions. For example, suppose one lane of a city highway is blocked due to an accident. The latest camera images show that a traffic jam has already formed. The traffic management center sends this information to all vehicles in the vicinity. Fritz Kasslatter, who happens to be driving in his test vehicle, receives the message in the form of an exclamation point that appears on his onboard unit. The unit automatically changes his route to avoid the traffic jam.

The great thing about this feature is that it provides data that is more up-to-date than radio traffic reports – not to mention tailored to the needs of each driver. “In some cases, traffic reports today arrive too late and aren’t precise enough,” says Kasslatter. “But in the future, every vehicle will also serve as a traffic and congestion monitoring unit that delivers data anonymously to a traffic management center in real time. The center will generate a forecast very quickly and use Car2X communication to send it only to those vehicles that could be affected. In other words, vehicles will only receive information they can actually use.”

Focus on User-friendliness. Researchers working in the Testfeld Telematik project are striving to find out not only how well communication between vehicles and infrastructure functions, but also which features drivers really need. One of their tasks is to ensure that only information that might be of use to a driver at a given moment is displayed. This “Vehicle Internet,” which in the future will enable cars to communicate directly with one another, may sound like it’s still a long way off. But the project has been designed to demonstrate that Car2X can, in principle, work today. However, a wide range of requirements need to be met before such a system can be introduced in Europe. That’s because proper functioning of the telematics features depends heavily on the number of participating vehicles and the systems installed in the road infrastructure.

Tomorrow’s cars will also transmit information about themselves – for example, their average speed – and the traffic situation to other vehicles. The more vehicles, traffic lights, sensors, and cameras hooked up to the communication system, the more precise will be the data that is transmitted and received. “A single vehicle is enough to measure traffic flow,” says Kasslatter. “However, if we want to know where the back of a traffic jam is, we need to have a suitably equipped car at that location.” Another challenge is to ensure that all system participants, regardless of the brand or manufacturer, “speak the same language.” Several European automakers, including BMW, Volvo, and Volkswagen, have thus developed a strategy for cooperative systems. They plan to begin offering initial services in 2015. These services will be transmitted directly to cars via radio and will include information on disabled vehicles, construction sites, and location-based traffic data. None of this would be possible without the input of many additional partners, including several infrastructure operators and traffic control centers that together established the Car2Car Communication Consortium, which has been researching cooperative systems since 2002. One initial success here has been the license-free allocation of the 5.9-gigahertz frequency band for safety-related services.

A World of New Services. The consortium is now developing a minimum standard set of useful functions that each new vehicle will need to have. In addition, it will be necessary to provide such functions at relatively low cost even without widespread Car2X. The most important features will include the transmission of information from infrastructure facilities to cars via traffic management centers.

Other functions, such as those that may be of interest to drivers of electric vehicles, will be added later. One possibility would be a system that enables drivers to locate and reserve a time slot at the nearest charging station. Also conceivable are services that allow emergency vehicles to communicate with traffic lights, thus triggering green lights and minimizing response times, while associated services would be designed to keep buses on schedule. Traffic infrastructure will also have to be modernized. “The first things we’re going to focus on are major arteries in cities,” says Kasslatter. To this end, European highway operators and automakers have established an organization known as the Amsterdam Group to bring all relevant stakeholders together to discusss the deployment of Car2X systems. Mobility would become even smoother and safer if vehicles could drive autonomously. Whether or not that happens depends less on technical feasibility – which has been demonstrated in a number of projects – than on costs and public acceptance. Even Kasslatter, after all, admits that he gets something of a charge out of his daily battle with traffic lights.