The research of the Research Training Group "SocialCars - cooperative (de)centralized traffic management" is about the significant improvement of the urban compatibility of future road traffic through cooperative approaches. "How can the individual actors in road traffic make optimal use of the traffic infrastructure so that safety is increased and traffic jams and environmental pollution are avoided?“
Funding body:
German Research Foundation (DFG)
Partner:
The collaboration of specialists from the three universities of Hanover, Braunschweig and Clausthal at the Lower Saxony Research Center for Vehicle Technology (NFF) offers ideal conditions for the interdisciplinary research that is required to solve research questions in SocialCars. It encompasses the disciplines of geodesy / geoinformatics, computer science, communication technology, traffic planning, traffic psychology, business informatics and industrial engineering.
In addition to traffic safety, urban and environmental compatibility represent the central challenge for the development of future urban traffic systems. Cooperation among road users and between them and their environment is a key element in order to better meet these requirements. In order to be able to develop cooperative approaches for assisting road users that make a significant contribution to this objective, it is necessary to understand the dynamic interactions between road users with their different means of transport and the infrastructure in psychological and technical terms and to be able to reproduce them in models. Based on this, strategies and procedures for cooperative traffic management can be developed.
In order to understand these relationships, the focus is put on people as road users. They move through a traffic system which is characterized by the urban space, that is, the built infrastructure and means of transportation within it, and influenced by the regulations of cooperative traffic management. Technical systems support them in these decisions. Future development will shift from today's driver assistance systems, which inform and warn the driver, to cooperative assistance systems through which the decisions of individual people are also taken into account and subsequently integrated into the dynamic traffic management.
Research in the Research Training Group examines the interaction of central (system-optimal) control and decentralized (user-optimal) action as well as the development of dynamic models in which both perspectives are taken into account. In the Research Training Group, these complex questions of (de)centralized cooperative traffic management are to be addressed and the training of young scientists with relevant specialist and interdisciplinary knowledge should take place.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernhard Friedrich
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Institut für Verkehr und Stadtbauwesen
Hermann-Blenk-Straße 42
38108 Braunschweig
Tel.: 0531 391 66801
E-Mail: friedrich@tu-braunschweig.de