Following the evolvement of the digital era, the urban landscape has shifted to a new paradigm, which has been named intelligent cities in recent times. The construction of an intelligent city requires a complex urban environment, which integrates multiple facilities, human movements, technology, society systems, politics, and economics, and therefore the intelligent planning for the infrastructure, growth, transport, and safety. As one of the core pillars of Smart Cities, Smart Mobility encompasses new technologies and revolutionary solutions to provide a safer, greener, and more efficient future, reshaping and optimizing transportation.
On July 7, in the sixth edition of the nexFrontier webinar series, experts from the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research on Dependable, Ubiquitous Automation (NCCR Automation), ETH Zurich, EPFL, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and Tongji University participated in a fruitful discussion on the latest research advancements in intelligent transportation systems.
The event was kicked-off by Dr. Philppe Roesle, CEO of Swissnex in China, with a short welcome, followed by Prof. Dr. John Lygeros, Director of the NCCR Automation and Head of the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, who introduced the goals, structure, and activities of the NCCR Automation.
Prof. Dr. Nikolas Geroliminis, the Principal Investigator at the NCCR Automation and the head of the Urban Transportation Systems Lab at EPFL, talked about the large-scale monitoring and control of large-scale congested transport networks. Human mobility in congested city centers is a complex and dynamic system with a high density of population, various transport modes competing for limited space, and different operators trying to manage various parts of the system efficiently. Prof. Geroliminis underlined that we need to take a holistic approach to tackle these challenges and presented to the audience how his research team studies the spatiotemporal relation of congested links in large networks, develops new advancements in the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram, observes congestion propagation, identifies the effect of multimodal interactions in network capacity and finally designs network-level control strategies to improve multimodal mobility.
Subsequently, Prof. Dr. Yibing Wang, Vice Director of the Institute of Intelligent Transportation Systems at Zhejiang University, presented a novel traffic control concept of the internal boundary control for bi-directional lane-free traffic of connected and automated vehicles on freeways. The investigation results show that the proposed integrated control scheme can maximize the utilization of road infrastructure and remove congestion at overloaded ramp-merging areas, which however, cannot be achieved using internal boundary control or ramp metering alone. Prof. Dr. Chi Xie, Professor at the College of Transportation Engineering and Urban Mobility Institute at Tongji University, introduced the Intelligent Vehicle-Platooning Transit (IVPT) system which integrates many conventional and emerging vehicular and traffic control technology. It is designed and tested to provide urban passengers with a comfortable, affordable, rapid, and station-to-station mobility service.
Following that, Prof. Li Li from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University showed us his research on cooperative driving strategies at the road network level with a fundamental macroscopic diagram. He and his team investigated the performance of the passing orders derived from different collaborative driving strategies on the network traffic through a series of simulation experiments. Results show that the passing order plays a dominant role in improving the network traffic efficiency. Dr. Kenan Zhang, a Post-doc researcher at Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, gave an overview of her research on the ride-hail service market, focusing on a physical matching model that captures the interactions between passengers and vehicles. She also showed how the different matching mechanisms lead to diverse market equilibrium and, in turn, affect the design of operational strategies and regulations.
Our last speaker, Dr. Xia Yang, Research Professor at the College of Transportation Engineering at Tongji University, gave a talk on the dynamic bus allocation and routing for multimodal emergency evacuations based on dynamic system optimization to improve evacuation efficiency. She presented an innovative multimodal evacuation model and discussed the solution methods. In the Q&A session, topics such as key challenges for future mobility and transport, the relationship between cooperative driving and automated driving were discussed. Researchers and experts from Switzerland and China look forward to engaging in further exchanges and discovering potential collaboration opportunities.
