Exploration and tradeoff of advanced sensor fusion architectures in designing for reduced congestion using advanced traffic management techniques

As a response to rapidly increasing costs due to congestion in urban traffic environments, the development of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) has paved the way towards new and innovative mobility concepts. With most of these concepts offering benefits in travel time and congestion relief, they also come with requirements of a fully participating vehicle network and a centralized routing architecture which is encountered with skepticism. To bridge the gap between concepts and reality, an intermediate, transitional centralized routing solution is recommended. With the selection of a viable routing control method as a key objective, this work is proposing a sensor fusion approach that is informed by traffic situational awareness. Testing and evaluation through a virtual experimentation framework will allow for assessment of alternative control methods, and will enable tradeoffs for the selection of more capable sensor fusion architectures. A demonstration of the virtual experimentation environment is provided, showing trades in travel time reduction for differing levels of vehicle participation in the routing solution.