Inner-city goods transportation and factory traffic pose particular challenges for cities and regions with a high number of industrial companies. The increase in traffic caused by trucks and the comparatively slow adaptation of infrastructure are often reasons for traffic obstructions, congestion and accidents. In order to achieve an improved traffic flow, which at the same time protects the safety of road users and residents, a consortium of 11 project partners from industry, universities and research institutions have joined forces and are facing the challenges in a joint project under the leadership of IWT Wirtschaft und Technik GmbH.
Project partners from industry are ETO GRUPPE Beteiligungen GmbH (Stockach), IHSE GmbH (Oberteuringen), IMST GmbH (Kamp-Lintfort), Netwake Vision e. K. (Überlingen), TWT GmbH (Stuttgart), Voltra Solutions GmbH (Langenargen) and ZF Friedrichshafen AG (Friedrichshafen). Research institutions and universities participating in the project include the project coordinator IWT Wirtschaft und Technik GmbH (Friedrichshafen), the Institute of Transportation Systems Engineering of the German Aerospace Center e. V. (Braunschweig), the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University Ravensburg (Friedrichshafen Technology Campus) and Hahn-Schickard-Gesellschaft für angewandte Forschung e. V. (Villingen-Schwenningen).
Digitization, automation and networking provide solutions to the challenges that the Friedrichshafen test area and the city of Friedrichshafen represent as a good environment for complex mobility systems. As part of ALFRIED, infrastructure components, systems and concepts for Automated and Connected Driving (ACD) are being further developed, researched and tested. The project focuses on infrastructure and a smart city control center.
Initially, technologies are tested in a demonstration environment. This will be followed by testing at the Friedrichshafen digital test area on a plant traffic route in real traffic. In a first step, journeys are made between the plants. The trucks will be equipped with special sensor technology for this purpose in order to obtain more information about trips, disruptions due to traffic congestions, weather or similar. Initially, the citizens of Friedrichshafen will not notice any of this.
However, the declared long-term goal of the project is to minimize journeys between plants via newly developed infrastructure components and data integration. The ACD solutions tested in this way will then in turn be transferable to other use cases, such as intercity transport, city logistics and future autonomous driving.
Under the leadership of the ETO GRUPPE, a safe, intelligent and cost-optimized infrastructure technology for the support of Automated and Connected Driving (ACD) is being developed in the sub-project "Intelligent Delineator" in cooperation with the partners. This will be integrated and tested in the Friedrichshafen test area. The intelligent delineator is to be operated energy-autonomously by means of energy harvesting and uses various sensors and data processing to identify potential hazards and provide tamper-proof information on them. The integrated sensor box contains sensors for traffic flow, weather and vehicle classification, hardware condition monitoring, energy harvesting modules and a communication unit for ACD. In addition, depending on the application, a high-precision positioning unit can be added to help easily master even difficult driving situations, such as construction sites or road constrictions.
From an extended workbench to a reliable development partner to a driver of innovation - the ETO GRUPPE has developed impressively over seven decades. The foundation stone was laid in 1948 by the couple Christa and Hermann Laur with Elektroteile GmbH Oberuhldingen near Lake Constance. Today, the companies of the ETO GRUPPE are present in Europe, America and Asia and are among the market leaders in their main business areas.
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