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InterLink – on the road to smarter public transport

Published Feb 19, 2019

In 2018 our project InterLink was completed, and the results are now public. Amongst other things it has been investigating how dynamic scheduling can be constructed based on data from both autonomous vehicles and traditional ones.

In the transition from traditional traffic systems to ones containing autonomous vehicles, the handling of dynamic traffic data is one of the hurdles that need to be overcome. Traditionally, buses leave according to schedule, regardless of how many passengers have boarded. With autonomous vehicles, that could change.

– With autonomous shuttles, the schedules could be more dynamic. One bus could depart when it’s full and another one could immediately be called to take any remaining passengers, says Jonas Mårtensson who has headed up the research at ITRL.

In the project, public transport data was used in real-time simulations of a transport system, and small autonomous vehicles in the smart mobility lab were challenged to interact with the data, each other and user input.

You can find a short video describing the workings of the project here.