An unified vehicle supervising and traffic information system

An unified vehicle supervising and traffic information system architecture is proposed. This new architecture integrates different system functions such as digital mobile radio communication, vehicle monitoring, traffic information collection, dynamic route guidance, and automatic toll collection into a single system architecture. A vehicle communication and ranging system is the radio interface of the architecture. Packetized data transmission through this radio interface can be used to measure the received signal delay by pulse ranging. An uplink message from a vehicle containing vehicle speed information and the measured delay are both sent to a traffic control and information center for vehicle monitoring. The center estimates the vehicle location, and calculates the average traveling time and average congestion level for each road link accordingly. Vehicle monitoring information and the estimated traffic condition can be offered to either the public or dispatching centers. A toll collection center will be able to automatically charge a vehicle through the monitoring process. Furthermore, a vehicle will be able to access the traffic control and information center to obtain its own dynamic route guidance information, and each vehicle can be guided in such a way to optimize the overall road traffic. Finally, we suggest two methods which use the infrastructure of existing digital cellular systems (GSM and IS-95) to implement the proposed system architecture.