COnverged coMMunication, control and scheduling Infrastructure for multi pods-based Transport Systems

Urban mobility is constantly introducing multiple environmental, societal and economic challenges. Indeed, due to the lack of effective transport alternatives, 54% of the French population still use their cars every day.  To tackle such issues, URBANLOOP SAS is currently developing an on-demand and on-rail pods-based autonomous transport system. The Urbanloop system, a unique concept in the world, is composed of a fleet of autonomous rail pods that can transport up to a couple of persons while supporting disabled access. It combines the benefits of railway transports, such as low power consumption and the benefits of on demand transport, i.e. no intermediate stops and no waiting time. COMMITS project aims to develop a converged communication, control and scheduling infrastructure to build a cyber-physical system for managing the Urbanloop transport network at a large scale. The main challenge is to control the entire network while respecting safety, security and timing constraints. This system needs to respond instantaneously, automatically and adaptively to multiple and simultaneous rail route requests. At the scale of a city, the cyber-physical system should be able to orchestrate around 10 and 4000 pods in real time with the following characteristics: no waiting time, no intermediate stops and connections and an average speed of 60km/h.

Adapting the standard architecture for rail-based systems, namely the CBTC (Communication-Based Train Control) is not sufficient to meet the challenges of an Urbanloop system. Indeed, the CBTC architecture is too restrictive in terms of outflow so that the expected performance cannot be achieved. COMMITS will develop its own control and scheduling system as well as the low-latency communication architecture on which the system relies in order to automate an on-demand and rail-based transport system. To this end, both centralized or decentralized approaches will be investigated and compared. The centralized one is composed of a central entity communicating with every pod to generate and send to them their roadmap, in real time. A local controller is conceived on each pod, in order to respect the roadmap. All the intelligence, as well as the safety functions are integrated in the central entity. Communications between the pods and the central entity will be significant in this approach. In order to reduce the communication load, the decentralized approach will be developed by transferring the intelligence (partially or totally) to the pods and loops. Security and performance management must be handled locally. For those two approaches, COMMITS also has to conceive the communication architecture to ensure a reliable information transfer, with low latency between the system components (pod to central entity or pod to pod). COMMITS will also manage the integration and evaluation of these approaches on a real-world testbed.