F2008-01-025
The Future of Vehicle Navigation - Dynamic and Learning Navigation Systems
The future of vehicle navigation - dynamic and learning navigation systems
Martin Wiecker, Christian Ress Ford Forschungszentrum Aachen GmbH Suesterfeldstr. 200, 52072 Aachen, Germany Tel. +49 241 9421 458, Fax +49 241 9421 301 Mail: cress@ford.com, mwiecker@ford.com
With the increasing traffic flow all over Europe nowadays dynamic vehicle navigation systems, using the Traffic Message Channel - TMC to receive information about the actual traffic conditions, almost reach their limits in supporting traffic efficiency and safety. This paper outlines the concepts and achieved results of the INVENT project, that aimed on providing strategic route information to drivers through the use of so-called hybrid routing services. The route calculation is no longer based only on the local digital map. Due to an accurate knowledge about the state of traffic on the given road network as well as on environmental conditions a routing centre provides high-quality traffic information to the in-vehicle navigation system. The content of these messages will exceed the capacity of TMC, therefore a new protocol family (TPEG) is under development to especially fulfil these requirements. Further optimization of dynamic route guidance based on the results of INVENT is the goal of the AKTIV project. Here additional communication channels are applied to the system, i.e. car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication. The direct communication between vehicles will reduce the reaction time between the occurrence of a traffic jam and first cars using an alternative route. A second approach within AKTIV is that the vehicle itself collects and stores data while driving. The analysis of the so-called "local knowledge base" should be done in two different ways: Firstly the data will be sent to a central server and allows the estimation of travel times per road segment to enhance the digital map database. On the other hand the in-vehicle navigation system will use the local database as a kind of "driver's profile" to store individual travel times per road segment. Date and time of starting the trip becomes more and more important since the navigation system takes the individual travel time per road segment in conjunction with the enhanced digital map data into account for route calculation. In consequence the calculated route fits more to the actual conditions and optimizes individual travel time as well as balancing the traffic flow on the road network.