Managed information gathering and fusion for transient transport problems

This paper deals with vehicular traffic management by communication technologies from Traffic Control Center point of view in road networks. The global goal is to manage the urban traffic by road traffic operations, controlling and interventional possibilities in order to minimize the traffic delays and stops and to improve traffic safety on the roads. This paper focuses on transient transport, when the controlling management is crucial. The aim was to detect the beginning time of the transient traffic on the roads, to gather the most appropriate data and to get reliable information for interventional suggestions. More reliable information can be created by information fusion, several fusion techniques are expounded in this paper. A half-automatic solution with Decision Support System has been developed to help with engineers in suggestions of interventions based on real time traffic data. The information fusion has benefits for Decision Support System: the complementary sensors may fill the gaps of one another, the system is able to detect the changing of the percentage of different vehicle types in traffic. An example of detection and interventional suggestion about transient traffic on transport networks of a little town is presented at the end of the paper. The novelty of this paper is the gathering of information - triggered by the state changing from stationer to transient - from ad hoc channels and combining them with information from developed regular channels. -- information gathering ; information fusion ; Kalman filter ; transient traffic ; Decision Support System