Description

The simTD test field is located in the Frankfurt-Rhine-Main area, in the Hesse Region. This area is an important German traffic hub with major traffic generators such as the Frankfurt Airport, the Frankfurt Trade Fare and the stadium. The area is characterized by high traffic density and therefore allow experiments on all road safety and traffic efficiency functions under normal everyday conditions.

The deployment aspects in these projects are focused on the demonstration and interoperabilityof V2X applications. It aims at the largescale deployment of such an ITS. One of the primary goals of simTD is the enhancement of components from previous projects as well as the development of new ones where necessary

Objective

To increase road safety and traffic efficiency through V2X communication
Consolidating V2X functions from the categories of traffic efficiency, driving and safety as well as value-added services
Definition, analysis, specification and documentation of those functions that are to be developed and tested.
Development of test and validation metrics and methods in each phase of the overall system development in order to allow measurement and evaluation of the results
Consolidation and harmonization of requirements from the perspective of feasibility and performance as well as their compatibility of requirements within the sub-projects
Verification of functions and requirements within the context of individual milestones

Inputs/Assets

Infrastructure:

More than 100 ITS Roadside Stations (IRS)installed by the Hessian traffic centre and the Integrated Traffic Management Centre Frankfurt will be used to test the car-to-x communication:

58 IRS on motorways
22 IRS on rural roads
24 IRS in the city network (connected with signal control devices)

Test vehicles:

The overall simTD test fleet comprises an internal fleet with up to 100 controlled test vehicles as well as an external fleet with approximately 300 vehicles.
The internal simTD fleet of test vehicles comprises 20 core vehicles with expert drivers. 80 further vehicles are driven by persons without special training.

System Architecture

Is composed of 2 domains:

Vehicle domain: hardware and software for vehicular subsystem.
Infrastructure domain: subsystems relevant for the infrastructure services.

Vehicle domain: ITS Vehicle station (IVS)

Robustness, price, processing power, expandability, and usability within a heterogeneous application environment was taken into account while designing the IVS.
Vehicles are equipped with ITS vehicle stations (IVS) to communicate with each other using short range communication technology based on IEEE 802.11p.
Besides V2V and V2X communication, IVS is equipped with Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) hardware in order to have IP based access to backend services and route safety related messages over long range.
The additional IVS data significantly enhances the view of the ICS by enabling it to assess a highly detailed traffic situation at every moment. This task is not trivial; it is performed by a sophisticated but highly complex fusion of all the traffic and road related data available.

The ITS Vehicle Station, is built into the vehicles and is comprised of two units.

1. The Communication Control Unit (CCU):

Enables wireless communication with other vehicles and with the infrastructure. It also allows access to vehicle information and implements improved vehicle positioning.
It is based on embedded platform, comprising linux and a 400MHz microcontroller.
The medium access control (MAC) layer will be adjusted on project requirements and the concepts of C2C-CC and ETSI
Wireless manager aids to configure and select the wireless interfaces. Applications including test control component can select a preferred interface to transmit V2X data.
Due to the large number of different cars used in the field trials, a flexible mechanism of accessing CAN data is essential. Low Level Can Framework (LLCF) is a kind of intelligent CAN driver, which offers a standard socket interface to a component called a vehicle application programming interface (VAPI)

2. The Vehicle Application Unit (VAU)

It is the actual application carrier. It implements the in-vehicle application and provides the required system components. The VAU is also connected to the so-called Human Machine Interface (HMI) device, which is responsible for driver interaction.
GPS based positioning is improved by differential GPS and Dead Reckoning (DR) in order to help applications scale to the needed accuracy.
Map matching is available on the AU for applications.
The software architecture of the AU is based on Java/OSGL. OSGL facilitates integration of system software and applications as well as remote management of many AUs in an easy way.

Infrastructure domain:

1. The ITS Road side Stations:

The test site also includes ITS roadside stations (IRSs) which are integrated in the vehicular network and able to communicate with the vehicles using IEEE 802.11p.
Those devices will be installed at motorways junctions, motorways on-ramps or other major crossroads. The ITS Roadside Station can both send traffic relevant data to vehicles and also communicate with the ITS Central Station.
Some of those ITS Roadside Stations can also be connected to traffic lights in order to read and process information

2. The ITS Central Station:

It is the actual simTD backend system, which provides the required services and implements the infrastructure-related parts of the applications to be developed.
simTD has 2 different ICS:

Hessian traffic Center (HTC) is the ICS of Hessian state office for road and traffic affairs which is responsible for motorways ad rural roads.
Integrierte Gesamtverkehrsleitzentrade der Stadt Frankfurt am Main (IGLZ): ICS for the City of Frankfurt which covers the urban road network.

The IGLZ assesses the traffic situation within the City of Frankfurt, whereas the ICS of the State of Hessen assesses the traffic situation of the simTD trial area every minute (except Frankfurt). Both ICSs exchange their traffic situation results so that they can benefit from each other. Thus, drivers are provided with a comprehensive view of the overall traffic situation when driving through the simTD area.
Data exchange between ICSs (HTC and IGLZ) will be carried out via Datex-II v2.0. This XML-oriented standard was mainly designed and developed for exchanging traffic related data between ICSs

Communication Systems:

For direct communication between vehicles and between vehicles and the infrastructure IEEE 802.11p (ITS G5A) was used. The vital information regarding security and traffic efficiency was exchange on this line as they require the smallest latency.
IEEE 802.11b/g modules, to establish, through the Road Side Units, an IP-based communication on the Internet with the Test Management Centre and other Backend services. Wi-Fi will eventually be installed to ensure the transmission of large data sets.
IP-based communication through GPRS, EDGE, UMTS or HSPA
ITS stations are equipped with WLAN hardware based on IEEE 802.11b/g which enables to compare different communication technologies in order to optimize different ITS applications.

Test management center

It is the hub of field test. The tests in simTD cover the areas of communication tests, security tests, technology acceptance tests, penetration rate tests, and functional, reliability, and optimization tests. All tests have diverse requirements on the TMC, which result in the setup of six subsystems for test support and log data processing

Test support systems consists of 4 subsystems:

Test run planning system: Used by test planning team to describe and structure each field trial. Main details updated in this database for control and analysis are

Involved ITS stations
Routes for vehicle stations
Operational instructions for drivers
Test specific questionnaires
Log data to record
Preliminary criteria for success and failure of the trial.

2. Fleet Management system: Used for standard fleet and driver administrative tasks

3. Test control system: Plays a vital role in setting up and controlling the field trials. The routes operational instructions and questionnaires have to be provided to each driver as printouts. It provides simple two way communication between the stage directors of the trial and drivers.

4. Driver interview system

The log data processing systems are used for collection, transmission, storage, and display of live monitoring data and log data gathered during the field test from the infrastructure network, vehicle, and roadside stations. They consist of two subsystems: the live monitoring data system (LMDS) and the background log data acquisition and processing system (BLDS)

Its main function is to carry out the simTD tests and experiments, in particular to support data collection, evaluation and validation. This involves test procedure planning, the actual experiment, as well as subsequent measuring of data storage, and preparation. The test system will also implement a test bench, which allows cross-system integration tests during the development phase..
Information exchanged to coordinate the tests, instruct the drivers, and log relevant information is inherently integrated into the system using the UMTS link to exchange the data between vehicles and test center.

simTD defines 16 principal functions which is further divided into subsystems resulting of 21 functions. Functionality of all hardware and software components is modeled and deployed in simTD. UML model to ensure consistency and detect potential incompatibilities of interfaces.

Outcomes

Applications tested at this test site

Traffic: Monitoring of traffic situation and complementary information/basic functions

Data collection in the infrastructure side
Data collection by the vehicle
Identification of road weather
Identification of traffic situation
Identification of traffic events/incidents

Traffic (flow) information and navigation

Foresighted road/traffic information
Road works information system
Advanced route guidance and navigation

Traffic management

Alternative route Management
Optimised urban network usage based on traffic light control
Local traffic-adapted signal control

Driving and Safety

Local Danger Alert
Obstacle warning
congestion warning
Road Weather Alert
Emergency vehicle warning

Driving Assistance

In-vehicle signage/traffic rule violation warning
Traffic light phase assistant / Traffic light violation warning
Extended electronic brake light
Intersection and cross traffic assistance

Additional services

Internet access and local information services
Internet-based usage of services
Location-dependent services

The project built the first car-to-X communication cooperative traffic control centre. There were 500 participants that over 41,000 hours tested 120 vehicles, including several motorcycles, and drove over 1.65 million kilometres.

Traffic information:

Applications for traffic control can be implemented based on real-time information
Information about traffic situations is transmitted to traffic centers that can reliably forecast traffic trends and provide the resulting information to traffic participants.

Data privacy:

To reduce the traceability, number of certificates per vehicle is increased and vehicle-specific data is transmitted only in anonymized form.

Traffic information is transmitted in encrypted form to protect it from unauthorized access.
A Public Key infrastructure (PKI) is established for securing all messages originating from ITS stations.
Signatures are used to authenticate the messages sent, while the keys used to generate the signatures are certified by a Certification Authority located inside the TMC.
In order to increase the level of security, plausibility checks are applied to verify mobility data received from surrounding vehicles.

Social benefits:

Society benefits from the introduction of functions based on V2X communication due to the increase in driving and traffic safety.
Accidents are prevented, driving times are reduced, and carbon dioxide is saved.

Technological developments:

The radio standard of V2X communication was further developed.
Transmitter and receiver components for vehicles and transportation infrastructure were developed, integrated into the test environment and tested.
The radio technology is based on the familiar WLAN standard, which was extended to meet automotive requirements.
simTD drove the standardization of the message formats of V2X communication and interfaces to traffic-control systems forward.
The test scenarios were submitted to the standardization body ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) as the basis for development of conformity and interoperability testing.
Along with the field test in the simTD project, trials were also carried out in driving, traffic and accident simulations to evaluate the spheres of effectiveness and resulting potential for functions based on technology of the V2X communication.

Economic benefits:

Building on that knowledge and taking different introduction scenarios into consideration, the economic potential of specific functions was calculated.
At full penetration of functions based on V2X communication, an annual economic benefit of up to 6.5 billion euros can be obtained from traffic accidents avoided, and another 4.9 billion euros from the elimination of environmental burden.
For the period investigated from 2015 to 2035, a trend in cost/benefit ratio of about 3 to >8 was estimated.

Impact of the project:

Based on the outcomes of this project, the German vehicle manufacturers have stated that they will equip their new vehicles with the needed technology step by step starting in 2015 on the way to V2X communication.
The first applications will be construction site warnings and traffic situation detection, which an initiative between government and industry is already implementing.
Starting in 2015, a roadside cooperation infrastructure will be built for the first applications as part of the “Cooperative ITS Corridor Rotterdam-Frankfurt/M.-Vienna”. In this corridor, all construction site warning trailers will be equipped with appropriate transmitters. The expansion of this corridor throughout Germany is planned.
For V2X technology to be effective, public funding should be applied through these initiatives as soon as possible, to start equipping the infrastructure in the relevant areas with the transmitter stations required. This will make Germany a leader in V2X technology.

Major Outcome of the project:

The simTD project – “Safe, Intelligent Mobility, Test Area Germany” – demonstrated the practical feasibility of so-called V2X technology

Documents:

Evaluation form