California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

The aims of this MOU were to create an integrated environment for modeling traffic flow, sensor data, and the communications infrastructure for ATMIS. The research plan was to build separate tools for measuring the communications requirements of ATMIS traffic, modeling a mobile radio communications environment, and communications network design, and then to integrate them in an object-oriented environment from which one could also access existing or new road traffic simulation packages.

Section 1 of the report presents a framework for estimating the vehicle-roadside communications requirements taking the San Francisco East Bay region as a case study and for determining whether existing wide-area wireless technologies can be used to support those requirements. The study should be viewed within the contexts provided by the National ITS Architecture and the California ITS System Architecture as presented in Caltrans’ Advanced Transportation Systems Program Plan. When completed, the study can serve as an example to follow for developing the communications needs for ITS deployment in California metropolitan regions.

The second part of the report is prepared through a sub-contract to the University of Southern California and presented as a separate volume. It provides a modeling framework for the mobile radio communications environment.

Section 2 of the report describes enhancements made to the NetPlan planning tool. NetPlan is a tool for designing wireline communication networks. It has models of LANs (eg. Ethernet) and WANs; standard communication protocols (eg. CSWCD, TCP/IP); and various simulation and network optimization tools. The NetPlan enhancements made under this project deal with incorporating ATM networks in NetPlan libraries. The detailed results appear in a PhD thesis.

For reasons outlined in Section 3, the aim of integrating these tools in an object-oriented environment that could access traffic simulation packages was abandoned. In its place we have developed the framework presented in Section 1.