CONDUCTOR: Advanced, High-Level Traffic and Fleet Management

Project Description

CONDUCTOR’s main goal is to design, integrate and demonstrate advanced, high‐level traffic and fleet management that will allow efficient and globally optimal transport of passengers and goods, while ensuring seamless multi‐modality and interoperability, through dynamic balancing and priority‐based management of vehicles (automated and conventional). The project aims to upgrade existing models and technologies to fit future mobility needs placing autonomous vehicles at the center of future cities. The demonstrations, through mixed traffic orchestration, will mostly rely on public transportation, as the amount of private autonomous cars is still expected to be relatively low. The main driving force in demonstrations will be the consideration of users’ social needs. Within the upgraded fleet simulation environment, CONDUCTOR aims to investigate fleet management scenarios for a multipurpose transport system combining passengers and goods transportation. The fleet control model (including public transit and logistics) will be coupled with a multi-resolution traffic simulation model to evaluate network-wide effects of the implemented fleet management strategies for demand-responsive mobility services for people and goods. The proposed idea of ride-parcel-pooling aims at utilizing unused capacities by combining passengers and goods transportation flows within one transport system. We will also implement and evaluate cooperative routing strategies (social routing) for large scale CCAM vehicle fleets and aim at balancing the traffic loads on the overall road network. The multi-modal system (combining different transportation modes such as pedestrians, connected/autonomous cars, motorcycles, taxis, delivery cargo vehicles, buses, etc. ) will be optimized based on the user needs to ensure transport resilience and business continuity. Today’s city transport strategies are focusing on the efficient movement of people and goods and are prioritizing sustainable modes.

Tasks of the Chair

The main tasks of the chair in the CONDUCTOR project are:

• Development of a simulation model to represent an integrated service for passenger and freight transport (ride-parcel-pooling) operated with automated vehicles (CCAM). In order to evaluate the traffic impact of such a service, the simulation software for mobility-on-demand services "FleetPy" developed at the chair is coupled with the traffic simulation software "Aimsun".
• In the coupled simulation model, the effects of traffic control measures are investigated. In addition, cooperative routing strategies are developed that enable a balanced network load when high penetration rates of fleet vehicles are applied.