Section: New Results

Smart City and ITS

Participants : Indra Ngurah, Djibrilla Amadou Kountche, Xavier Gilles, Christophe Couturier, Rodrigo Silva, Frédéric Weis, Jean-Marie Bonnin [contact] .

The domain of Smart Cities is still young but it is already a huge market which attract number of companies and researchers. It is also multi-fold as the words "smart city" gather multiple meanings. Among them one of the main responsibilities of a city, is to organisation the transportation of goods and people. In intelligent transportation systems (ITS), ICT technologies have been involved to improve planification and more generally efficiency of journeys within the city. We are interested in the next step where efficiency would be improved locally relying on local interactions between vehicles, infrastructure and people (smartphones).

For the future "autonomous" vehicle are now in the spotlight, since a lot of works has been done in recent years in automotive industry as well as in academic research centers. Such unmanned vehicle could strongly impact the organisation of the transportation in our cities. However, due to the lack of a definition of what is an "autonomous" vehicle it remains still difficult to see how these vehicles will interact with their environment (eg. road, smart city, houses, grid, etc"). From augmented perception to fully cooperative automated vehicle, the autonomie cover various realities in terms of interaction the vehicle relies on. The extended perception relies on communication between the vehicle and surrounding roadside equipments. This help the driving system to build and maintain an accurate view of the environment. But at this first stage the vehicle only uses its own perception to make its decisions. At a second stage, it will take benefits of local interaction with other vehicles through car-to-car communications to elaborate a better view of its environment. Such "cooperative autonomy" does not try to reproduce the human behavior anymore, it strongly rely on communication between vehicles and/or with the infrastructure to make decision and to acquire information on the environment. Part of the decision could be centralized (almost everything for an automatic metro) or coordinated by a roadside component. The decision making could even be fully distributed but this put high constraints on the communications. Automated vehicles are just an exemple of smart city automated processes that will have to share information within the surrounding to make their decisions.

We participated in the definition of the distributed architecture that has been adopted by all partners of the SEAS project. The main principles of this architecture have been published and we developed several profs of concept that have been demonstrated in the project consortium. Our partner developed the components of the architecture that has been demonstrated in the final review of the project (in January). The principles of the architecture and data representation has been used to design an open reusable Data Manager in the context of the EkoHub projet. This modular software will be extended to fit the needs of Indra Ngurah and Rodrigo Silva works.