The vision is a Road Traffic Management System operating at urban, regional, inter-regional and international levels. This is a network made of nodes acting at local level that can be referred to as “Local Road Traffic Management Systems” (LRTM).

A LRTM is implemented by a closed-loop with the following functions:

• Collection and processing of data/ information from road vehicles

• Dispatch of collected information towards a Traffic Management Centre

• Transmission of information from Traffic Management Centre towards road vehicles, traffic control centres and distributed traffic control devices.

Co-operation between nodes allows increasing the traffic management scope to a wider geographical area in a bottom-up type of expansion through hierarchical levels.

The elements of the lower level (the LRTMs) are autonomous with their traffic management/control loop. They send data to their immediate upper level summarizing the traffic situation in their area of coverage. They receive instructions from their immediate upper level for co-operation between several LRTMs allowing global optimisation (as opposed to local optimisation of the LRTM).

The vision described above becomes more pragmatic, and implementation appears feasible, if one reduces its scope. Project MORYNE (Enhancement of public transport efficiency trough the use of mobile sensor networks ) is a particular case of Local Road Traffic Management System (LRTM) mentioned in the vision:

• MORYNE focuses on traffic in urban and sub-urban areas

• MORYNE addresses the issues of Public Traffic Management and City Traffic Management

• MORYNE considers using Public Transport vehicles (buses, tramways) as elements of a network of mobile sensors.

Objectives

With the combined Public traffic management and City traffic management scenario presented above as context, project MORYNE will focus on:

• The development of an approach for new safety- and efficiency-oriented transport management and traffic management.

• The development and validation of technologies for appropriate sensing, information processing, communication, interfaces.

• The development of an in-laboratory demonstrator.

• The validation of the proposed concepts through field testing.

• The analysis of potential impacts (social, economic, environmental) and the definition of further steps.