Road transport will remain a strategic sector in climate change, air pollution and noise. Despite high expectations of new vehicle technologies as a way to reduce transport impacts, the expected contribution of oil products in 2050 will 50%. In this context, a more efficient use of existing infrastructures has been identified by EU as a key strategy to reduce transport externalities. In line with this strategic orientation, various authors have demonstrated that a smart traffic allocation across multiple routes may result in significant energy savings.
In the FCT Project SMARTDECISION - Intelligent Vehicle Routing System for Enhanced Air Quality in Urban Areas was developed a set of eco-traffic management strategies and eco-routing applications. This project was successfully completed in March 2014, and has demonstrated that there is significant potential for emissions/fuel use reduction through intelligent traffic assignment strategies. However, it was also found that there is no unique solution that can optimize all traffic externalities (e.g. CO2 vs. local pollutants or emissions vs. travel time). Neither major traffic environmental externalities are calculated on an integrated way, not are ajusted to the local contexts of vulnerability, a factor often neglected in network optimization algorithms. Therefore, several inefficiencies may arise when implementing traffic management solutions without a holistic view of consequences across systems, since exposures are not proportional to traffic volumes only and incremental risks depend on site-specific factors.
The project @CRUiSE - Advanced Impact Integration Platform for Cooperative Road Use results within a partnership between the Transportation Technology Research group of the Centre for Mechanical Technology and Automation (TEMA), the Research group on Emissions, Modeling and Climate Change of the Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies (CESAM) - both from the University of Aveiro (U.A.) - and the Institute of Telecommunications (IT) at Aveiro, along with the Institute for Transportation Research and Education (ITRE-NCSU), USA.
The fundamental goal is to integrate road traffic impacts into a single analytical framework for use advanced traffic management systems (ATMS).
The Work plan is founded on 3 main pillars:
- Designing a conceptual methodology for assigning a link-based indicator that can evaluate different traffic-related externalities, adjusted to local contexts of vulnerability;
- Improving the interoperability between traffic-related models and new sources of traffic data;
- Optimizing the network operations by means of a decision support system.
Detailed description and experimental setup
Experimental Work-Road and environmental conditions monitoring
Development, integration and validation of related-traffic models
Dynamic link-based eco-indicator
Data fusion and data management
Network optimization and design of a decision support system
Dissemination and Reports