Establishment of digital economics and switching to Industry 4.0 is the strategy goal of Russia. Improvement of traffic infrastructure plays a very important role in this process. Scientists of South Ural State University within the AutoNet national technology initiative are working on the Smart Transportation project, in the frameworks of which an intelligent system for control over the city traffic system is to be created. The project will feature large industrial and IT companies of the country, as well as the city administration of Chelyabinsk.
Digital platform for transport control
The most important condition for formation of a modern transport infrastructure is its digitalization. A team of scientists of the SUSU Institute of Engineering and Technology’s Automobile and Tractor Faculty together with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are developing a single intelligent digital Smart Transportation platform for control over road traffic in megalopolises on the basis of a multi-component system of dynamic monitoring.
“Nowadays, the number of automobiles on the road is increasing day after day. As a result, a series of essential problems appears: the increasing number of car accidents, toxic emissions, noise, low travelling speed, traffic jams during the rush hours, high fuel consumption, etc. In large cities and megalopolises, it is difficult to qualitatively evaluate and forecast changes of the road situation, though such monitoring would help solving the majority of the mentioned problems,” says one of the project’s authors, Vladimir Shepelev, Candidate of Engineering Sciences, Associate Professor of the Automobile Transport Department.
In order to solve this problem, SUSU scientists are proposing to use modern information and television communication technology. This will allow organizing continuous collection of big volume of dynamic data on transport and pedestrian traffic in road network units, as well as due time perform their processing and analysis, computerize decision making for quick and efficient road traffic control.
Implementation of the single digital platform will allow perform computerized monitoring and control over road traffic, collection of road fees, response for emergency situations, analyze the road surface quality and environmental condition, etc.
Transport should be efficient
Implementation of the project requires conducting research and project works, completion of which corresponds with the NTI roadmap’s topic: “AutoNet: Car traffic control systems with high degree of automation”.
“The intensity of road traffic on the city streets does not comply with their traffic capacity. We are planning to develop our own software intended for multi-component identification and monitoring of vehicles, in order to analyze the causes of traffic jams. The existing techniques of traffic capacity calculation for road network units of cities do not take into account multiple factors, such as width of the crossing line, quality of the road surface, road marking places, climate, environmental condition, and other factors that significantly affect the road traffic in the city,” explains Vladimir Dmitrievich.
The proposed technique will allow performing a dynamic analysis of the current system of road traffic organization, as well as provide engineering and economic evaluation of efficiency from using the existing transport infrastructure of a city.
Intelligent traffic lights and smart bus stops
“In order to collect big dynamic data and perform operative computer-aided control over road traffic, we intend to implement intelligent traffic lights, smart bus stops, public transport sensors, adaptive tracking cameras, and dynamic road signs,” says the SUSU scientist. “In the future, a digital platform on the basis of implementing the system for dynamic data collection for storing and intelligent processing of big volumes of information is to be created based of SUSU Supercomputer, which is going to allow making efficient managerial and engineering decisions.”
The intelligent digital platform, by controlling road traffic on the basis of logistics principles, will allow for a significant decrease of the number of car accidents, as well as increase use efficiency of the city road infrastructure. The analysis and processing of incoming and accumulated data, performed by the digital platform, will allow obtaining new dependencies and regularities, which will provide constant self-learning of the system and its efficiency enhancement. Engineering and managerial decisions, made on the basis of collection and analysis of the big data, will allow for an increase of road network’s traffic capacity in megalopolises, and decrease the negative impact of automobile transport on the environment.
The Smart Transportation project will feature lecturers, postgraduates and students of South Ural State University. Moreover, partnerships are intended to be made with large industrial enterprises, such as UralDorProekt OOO, Intersvyaz Company, Yandex Company; cooperation is also planned with the Transportation Office of the City Administration of Chelyabinsk. Within the Autonet NTI, this will allow performing training of highly skilled specialists of new generation, who are ready to work under conditions of digital industry.
