mobility & accessibility

Year of publication: 2022

Year of publication: 2023

The Digital Twin Munich project (DZ-M) aims to depict complex urban environments through the use of static and dynamic components, and their semantic relationships. The project focuses on the development of a street network model and urban mobility simulation, utilizing the open source microscopic traffic flow simulation software SUMO. The transport demand is provided by the VISUM model of the city of Munich, and the data structure developed is compatible with standards such as OpenStreetMap, OpenDrive, CityGML, and GTFS. The project also includes the use of physical VRU simulators for data collection purposes, and the integration of these simulations into a 3D VR environment in Unity.

Year of publication: 2023

Travel demand is an essential input for the creation of traffic models. However, estimating travel demand to accurately represent traffic behaviour usually requires the collection of extensive sets of data on traffic behaviour. Traffic counts are a comparably cost effective and reproducible source of information on travel demand. The utilisation of traffic counts to estimate demand is commonly found in the literature as the static and dynamic O-D estimation problem. A variety of approaches have been developed over recent decades to tackle this problem. Usually initial estimates of the O-D matrix are calibrated by utilising traffic counts and considering different assignment models. Other approaches for the estimation of travel demand solely based on traffic measurements can be found in the simulation software SUMO. The present work demonstrates the systematic development of a network model in SUMO in the inner city of Munich. In a sample network the estimation of travel demand through the tools flowrouter and routeSampler is tested by utilising flow measurements from induction loop detectors. The tests delivered unsatisfactory results, which is proven through observations of traffic flows in the resulting simulations as well as comparisons to historic traffic counts. The lack of sufficient detector data and the complexity of the sample network are discussed as the main reasons for the results. It is concluded that the applied tools should be tested in future studies with a more extensive dataset to perform a more comprehensive review of both tools. Therefore, we deliver specific requirements based on the network example of Munich.

Year of publication: 2024

The growing number of cars and limited street space present significant challenges for cities, applying not only to moving but extending to stationary traffic. The quest for parking spaces exacerbates traffic congestion, noise, and air pollution, particularly in residential areas. To develop effective parking solutions for these challenges, a trustful data foundation on available parking space capacities, its usage and parking type is crucial. Gathering this data is currently time-consuming, requiring manual labeling and street inspections. Moreover, it must be repeated to keep the data current. Research on parking space management has heavily focused on monitoring designated parking lots with fixed cameras to identify free or occupied parking spaces. However, due to privacy concerns fixed cameras are not applicable for the larger part of the street space in European cities. This paper introduces a novel computer vision-based method for automatically collecting parking space capacities and parking type information. Our approach combines both street view and aerial imagery, which are recorded by a moving camera source. We tackle challenges in geo-referencing images, identifying parking types, classifying moving and stationary cars and dealing with partial occlusions in images. By not permanently recording the same environment, our approach lowers the surveillance risk, making parking capacity estimation scalable. We conduct a thorough evaluation of our methods and release a novel validation data set to allow for further research. In the future, more moving camera sources will be available when attached to city cleaning vehicles or to delivery drones.