Connected Cars and Traffic Flow Control

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) services are very useful in surface transportation, since they have the purpose of improving the traffic conditions and public services. In particular, the connected cars paradigm plays a key role in the evolution of the smart city, offering improvement in several field such as safety and efficiency. In this thesis we will focus on the preliminary stage of a possible implementation of an ITS application, based on connected cars. This preliminary stage consists in collecting data regarding the traffic flows in different scenarios and different assumptions like straight road single lane, straight road double lane, roundabouts. In particular, we study and analize the traffic flow behaviour in a crowded road and how an extraordinary event can affect the traffic shape. Our goal is to verify if we can use a queuering network model to represent the road. In this way, using our queue theory knowledges, we are able to improve traffic efficiency, travel comfort and safety. For example, if a car accident happens, we can suggest the other drivers to perform a lane changing in advance, in order to get away with long queues behind the obstacle. In this project, in order to carry out the simulations of the urban environment and the traffic flows, Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) package is used; indeed this simulator allows to manually create or edit a single road or a network and create a proper traffic flow. Morover, the post-processing phase on the data is done through MATrix LABoratory (MATLAB).