DIT4Tram

Contact Person: Prof. Dirk Helbing

Duration: 09/2021 - 08/2024

Funding: This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement 953783

Grant Website: external page https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/953783

Project Website: external page https://dit4tram.eu/

Our mobility ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex, especially in urban areas. This makes it virtually impossible to manage traffic in the traditional centralized way. Is another approach conceivable? In the EU project DIT4TraM we apply swarm intelligence: with little or no control from above, yet still achieving a common goal. This approach is tested in six different pilots.

It’s a fascinating spectacle—tens of thousands of starlings that form beautiful moving patterns in the air. Their aim is to scare off their natural enemies, biologists explain. The great thing is that they succeed in doing so without any direction or guidance from above. How do they do that? The swarm creates harmonious patterns because all birds individually follow a small set of local rules. These rules are also remarkably simple, like ‘keep enough distance from the neighbors, but not too much.’

Swarm intelligence
Traffic participants also have a common interest, namely a smooth and safe flow of traffic. To achieve these goals, road authorities use centralized traffic and mobility management to control and correct the traffic flows. But our mobility ecosystem has become so complex over the years that controlling traffic ‘from above’ is no longer tenable—especially if we want to manage it in a multi-modal way and include new transport services as well.

This forces us to think about a completely different approach to our traffic and mobility management. In this context, can we learn from the starlings and stop regulating centrally and top-down, and instead start regulating locally and bottom-up?

In the DIT4TraM project, Distributed Intelligence and Technology for Traffic and Mobility Management, external page twenty knowledge institutions, companies and governments are investigating and testing for the first time whether this ‘swarm intelligence’ approach is feasible for traffic and transport. Our focus is on individual travelers, connected cars, smart bicycles, and intelligent traffic control systems. Simply put, we are exploring how we can get these agents to communicate and interact locally in such a way that they automatically contribute to the greater goal of a smooth and safe traffic flow.

Brochure: "external page Applying swarm intelligence to manage multimodal traffic and transport flows"