Chair of Traffic Process Automation

The Chair "Traffic Process Automation" at the Faculty of Transport Sciences "Friedrich List" of the TU Dresden deals in teaching and research with traffic guidance systems, traffic control systems and traffic management for rail and road traffic.

We educate students in the field of study "traffic telematics". On the one hand, the teaching focuses on scientifically demanding courses. These are taught, for example, in traffic process automation with its modern instruments of optimization, in optimal control combined with decision-making methods, and in road traffic control technology. On the other hand, these are complemented by application-oriented lectures, practical courses, project work and technical excursions, which reflect the multimodal approach pursued in the chair.

Ensuring such a demanding education naturally requires corresponding emphases in our research and development services. Since 2006, nearly 100 research and development projects and contracts (third-party funded projects) have been processed. Funding sources are the EU, the federal government, the state of Saxony, as well as the state capital Dresden and the Dresdner Verkehrsbetriebe.

The aim of traffic telematics in road traffic is to make traffic processes automated, as efficient as possible, equal for all participants and resource-saving. This is achieved, for example, by traffic management systems, such as the fully automated traffic analysis, management and optimization system (VAMOS) for the Dresden metropolitan area, which is developed and maintained by members of the chair. In our current projects, we are particularly concerned with providing information for the implementation of energy-saving driving modes for the use of highly automated vehicles in road traffic. This includes green time predictions of traffic-dependent switched traffic signals, tailback length estimations, and energy-efficient routing. Driver assistance systems for streetcars and buses in interaction with cooperative traffic signal systems and their practical implementation form a main research focus in the area of public transport.

In the area of automation and optimization of telematics processes, the objective of a real-time capable application for railroads in passenger and freight transport is pursued. In addition to the use and exploitation of optimization and control engineering methods, our focus is equally on algorithm and software development. The development of driver assistance systems for energy-optimized driving as well as the operations management system with conflict resolution could be driven up to prototypical implementation or product maturity.

In the VIMOS Competence Center, which is affiliated with the professorship, partners from research, industry and the public sector contribute their expertise in the field of traffic telematics.