This manuscript first introduces a survey of emergency goods supply record by Tohoku University. It is difficult to make a record of emergency goods supply because the supply flow is ephemeral. Hence, the flow has not been well retained for record at any of past disasters. To draw a whole picture of the flow, we have to therefore fuse all the relevant information by utilizing our empirical knowledge. Four aspects of emergency goods supply (node, link, mode and information) are then discussed for improvement of the logistics.

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    The Great East Japan Earthquake brought serious damage in extensive area. It is valuable for reconstruction and disaster prevention to survey and record the situation of the damage in detail. We recorded 360° panoramic video along the road from Miyagi to Aomori for more than 600km by our sensing vehicle. The first mission was sent just 40 days after the Earthquake, and followed up every month until now. We created a prototype system to experience the disaster area using virtual reality goggles, for preventing the important memory from vanishing and for contributing to disaster prevention education.

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    East Japan Great Earthquake, we were keenly aware that it is so difficult to protect human life. Taking count of the earthquake damage in transportation infrastructure, this report discuss about how to use the ITS for the future reconstruction of the area. In particular, based on the lessons from the disaster, not only disaster prevention measures but also a combination of disaster mitigation measures to minimize the damage, we named it “disaster endurance measures”, are important. In terms of implementation of new disaster endurance measures concept, this report explains how ITS works well.

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    Based on the experience of The Tohoku Great Earthquake, the concept of disaster mitigation in addition to disaster prevention is important in introducing anti-disaster countermeasures. In case of developing social system as the disaster prevention and mitigation, they should be useful not only on disaster but also usual. In this report, we examined the sustainable ITS system using ICT in MICHINOEKI for disaster prevention and mitigation on the viewpoint of mode-changing on disaster from usual.

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    Precise and accurate 3D model of a road structure is basic information which can be utilized for various purposes, such as safety measures, driving simulation, and reference data for autonomous driving. Generally, the 3D model of a tunnel where GPS signal is not available has been constructed based on positioning using gyro sensor, however, error accumulation becomes a considerable problem in the case of long tunnels. We propose a method to obtain geometrically optimal whole structure of a tunnel: (1) Acquire a set of partial structures by static scanning and align them by 3D matching using edge feature (2) Fix the absolute position of the data for both ends of the tunnel by GPS and align the rest data again. By applying this method, we succeeded to create the 3D model of Kanaya Tunnel in Shin-Tomei Expressway, whose length is 4.6km.

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    The design of parking lots has been focused on space efficiency, however, the authors also point out the needs to focus on time efficiency, because poor-skilled drivers would impede the parking operations of subsequent vehicles. So, in order to study the design method for functional parking spaces from the viewpoint of driver’s comfort and safety in addition to space efficiency and time efficiency, we made preliminary observations of driver behavior in a parking garage. As a result, we propose a basic approach for further study of functional parking spaces.

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    An OD matrix which is generally used as input data of network traffic simulation is made through the conventional trip-based OD estimation which may not properly consider trip chaining. In estimating Electric Vehicle (EV) trip patterns, however, trip chaining and its battery State of Charge need to be considered properly because there is severe restriction of its driving range. This paper proposes the practical technique to estimate trip chaining for the application of network traffic simulation considering the EV battery State of Charge.

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    This study is intended to develop the Japan nation-wide traffic simulation system. As a result of the past, developed a national system to simulate using grid computing technology. Now, grid computing that will be divided into several areas of the country, has remained in the route choice model to have been considering only the traffic situation in the area divided. Independent of the constraints of the area was divided, so it is possible to determine a strategy for routing over a wide range, an improved route choice model. This paper describes the challenges of the traditional route choice model, and describing a new route choice method was developed to solve the issue.

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    Kashiwa city is one of the 4 ITS FOT cities in Japan and developing “Local ITS Center” for solving several city issues such as traffic congestions on trunk roads, environment effects by CO2. The center will be able to visualize traffic issues on the 4D Virtual City and evaluate solutions before and after deploying countermeasures by means of integrating a lot of data from road traffic concerned bodies such as car prove, traffic counter, demand bus, cycle shear and so on. This paper discussed the concept of Local ITS Center conducted by a municipal and a university.

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    The Great Earthquake Disasters in East-Japan struck on 2011/3/11 revealed various problems and potentials, such as serious effects by cut-downs of transportation and communication, great risks by concentration of population, and usefulness of new media as social media service in urban area, simultaneously with severe damages in the north-east regions. Especially, also from the experience of investigations in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture in June, EV (Electric Vehicle) is shown to have a great potential. Then, it is firmly confirmed the importance of the targets of “Nagasaki EV&ITS project” promoted now in Goto islands, Nagasaki and the needs to extend it to much wider advanced society model concept.
In this paper, the latest progress of the project and the future eco-city concept “MITE (Mobility-IT-Energy) network project” as its future prospects are introduced based on the context.

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    This paper deals with a human machine interface (HMI) between a personal mobility vehicle (PMV) and a driver using a parallel wheel type PMV. This vehicle has the feature of integrating with man and moving. Therefore, we proposed for man to change information into the movement of the vehicle, and to tell it. A signature wave was added to change the behavior of the vehicle. Finally, the difference of the recognition rate of an existing technique and the interaction was clarified by the experiment.

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    The prototype of “Eco-ride”, a new energy-saving public transport for short-distance trips, has been developed applying roller coaster technologies. A simulation method has been introduced to adopt the prototype system within reasonable costs for rural arreas using ITS to be flexible to land shapes or demand changes, to realize frequent unmanned operations.

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    This paper describes a system which allows multiple users to see the virtually reconstructed cultural heritage site using Mixed Reality (MR) techniques. Recent years, e-Heritage that aims to digitally archive, display and analyze the cultural heritage assets becomes one of the active research fields. Especially, the virtual reconstruction using MR technology is getting attention over the world. The MR system is made for personal use, and the users could not move freely in large spaces. Therefore, we propose a system that enables multiple users to enjoy the virtual reconstruction while moving around the heritage site using transportations.

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    One of essential technologies to realize the autonomous driving of vehicle is a danger mitigation method by vehicle cooperation system. In this study, we focus on a self-organized danger mitigation concept by adopting information processing mechanisms of the body immune system and modeling the functions of natural immunity and acquired immunity. In details, the autonomous vehicle cooperation system controls individual vehicle- dynamics, quantitatively calculates risks of individual autonomous vehicles, and finally, mitigates risky condition in the entire system by generating self-organized driving behavior.

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    Various automation technologies have been carried out in recent years. These include automatic car driving established with a number of sensors and actuators. This even enables to guide the vehicle to the destination by adding improvements to the infrastructure. So, assuming the use for Park and Ride combined with valet parking, we introduce the concept of utilizing a simple automatic driving control by road infrastructure at places such as underneath the elevated railway tracks. Also, a simulation result has been presented, which uses the vehicle motion control by some designed road shapes.

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    For navigation in tunnel environment, GPS sensors and ordinary cameras can’t function effectively. Thus infrared cameras are installed on top of our experimental vehicle, and here we propose an efficient object detection method to detect emergency lights from the collected data in tunnel environment. The proposed method firstly detects keypoints by setting thresholds for intensity of uniformly sampled points. Each keypoint is then verified by the appearance of its surrounding sub-image. After clustering the keypoints which satisfy the verification, the method verifies the keypoint clusters by their appearance and temporal information. Though the later steps are time-consuming, they deal with very few instances. And this improves the efficiency of the method, while not losing effectiveness of the appearance and temporal information. Thus the method gives promising results in real time. Detection performance and efficiency are verified by experiments carried on challenging real data.

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    It’s necessary to examine efficiency and safety of automatic platooning of trucks as a part of Energy-saving ITS Developing Project in Japan. Therefore, inputting controller of automatic platooning into a universal driving simulator, a simulation system was realized to observe driver behaviors when malfunction of the automatic platooning occurs. In previous study, driver behaviors only in the second truck were analyzed when the first truck was out of order. However, it becomes possible to evaluate driver behaviors of the third truck to reproduce the motion of the second truck as a projected image, which is calculated by logging the driving operations of the second truck. In this experimental study, the feasibility of the proposed method was validated.

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    The improvement of the driving simulator is useful to examine the safety of the automatic platooning by the Energy-saving ITS Technologies Project. It was confirmed that the full vehicle of 10m gap distance could stop only with brakes by the manual maneuver of the driver in emergency. However, avoidance maneuver of only brake has a risk of colliding of the following vehicle. So, the collision avoidance method by a steering is evaluated. In this paper, the avoidance maneuver response delay and behavior of a driver are analyzed of every gap distance of automatic platooning.

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    Parameter of vehicle such as vehicle weight and center of gravity are varied largely depending on the loaded condition. Varying of parameter of vehicles has much influence on performance of automatic platooning driving control. Therefore it is required to identify parameters and estimate the state of a vehicle. In this paper, a method to identify vehicle parameters is proposed and performance of the proposed identification method is examined through numerical simulations using commercially available multi-body software.

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    Energy saving technology by using intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has been developed in energy-saving ITS project. Automatic platooning is studied to save energy cost by reducing the air resistance. To put into the practical use, it is very important to keep driver’s safety during the platoon-driving. Brake system of platoon-driving truck is required of high reliability to driver’s safety.

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    This paper introduces development of a hybrid traffic simulation framework that evaluates impacts on CO₂ emissions due to several ITS applications. We developed the prototype using this framework harmonized with CO₂ emission model (EM). This framework provides a simulation environment to combine three traffic simulation models (SOUND, AVENUE and MicroAVENUE) in different resolutions. ITS applications should be evaluated comprehensively so that various ITS applications with different scales of impacts can be assessed. Therefore, we develop the hybrid simulation model that is applicable to a wide range of spatial scales from a large area such as a whole Japan to a small area covering dozens of intersections. This study is a part of our themes in the Energy ITS Project.

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    There is a need to combine a traffic simulation model and a CO₂ emissions model for evaluating the reduction of CO₂ emissions caused by introducing ITS applications. In traffic simulations covering a wide area, estimates of traffic data should be based on two operating modes, stopped and steady-state running, because this reduces computational complexity and simplifies verification. A method for estimating CO₂ emissions that reproduces the acceleration energy from two-mode traffic data was developed. The method was verified with experiment data on various roads, and it was confirmed to have high CO₂ estimation accuracy.

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    This paper reports impacts on CO₂ reduction by the ‘moderate acceleration, which is known as one of effective components of Eco-Driving. Since reduction of green house gases is required for solving global warming, development of a CO₂ assessment method by several strategies is particularly important. For this purpose, a method that can be applied to a large scale area is proposed by combining traffic simulation and CO₂ emission models. Applying to Tokyo 23 wards, not only positive but also interesting negative impacts on CO₂ reduction are found.

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    When we estimate CO₂ emission using traffic simulation models and CO₂ emission models, it is important to make an international agreement on common procedure for model validation because each evaluator likely to use their own models, generally. Therefore, this project proposes a framework for validation of traffic simulation models and CO₂ emission models, and tries to build a consensus through international workshops. It also conducts a field observation in order to obtain actual traffic state data which can be used for validation, and a validation trial to confirm the feasibility of the proposed validation framework.

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    One way to improve drivers’ skill is to provide effective advice for the inexperienced driver on maneuvers. So it is important to understand the difference between skilled and inexperienced drivers beforehand. Such critical difference is expected to appear in accelerator, brake, and steering operations accompanying the state of vehicle. This paper proposes a statistical method to extract these differences from large amounts of candidate features derived from driving operation data. And then, a basic experiment with a driving simulator is carried out to verify the method.

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    Recently, many Advanced Drivers Assistance Systems have been developed to enhance drivers’ cognition, decision, and operation. To perform those systems, monitoring and feedback of a driver’s behavior including one’s intention is important. As a monitoring system of a driver’s mental work load or stress during driving, grip strength is analyzed in this research. It is hypothesized that a driver loose one’s grip when relaxed, on the other hand a driver tighten one’s grip when stressed. Then, subjects are asked to drive several conditions, which brings different stress on them, and correlation between grip strength and stress are studied.

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    To reduce the traffic accidents by the elderly, it is desirable to develop a driver assistance system for the elderly. In this paper, as an additional task, paced auditory serial addition test (PASAT), a calculation task given by voice, was imposed on drivers to examine the effect of the auditory task on the driving performance. By analyzing the steering data of the vehicle, the effect of auditory task on the driving performance of elderly was investigated. The results showed that the smoothness of steering operations worsened while the PASAT was imposed on drivers.

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    The more certainty with which the driver’s behavior at the onset of yellow indication can be estimated the more efficiently the signal change interval duration can be calculated without compromising on safety. Although, it is considered that several factors affect the signal change interval, the effects of arrival patterns caused by signal coordination are focused in this study. It is hypothesized that the vehicles generally require different signal change intervals with varying levels of coordination. This paper presents review of previous works which support the hypothesis and indicates conceptual framework, methodology, and summary of parameters which are necessary for the analysis.

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    For the acoustical design of comfortable environment in a car, authors have been applied the Finite-Difference Time-Domain method as a numerical simulation method. In a previous research^{1, 2)}, on the basis of the assumption of an extended reacting boundary, the analytical model considering wave propagation inside seats was introduced. By comparing the actually measured and calculated impulse responses inside the car cabin, the predictability of the model was investigated. On the other hand, for the car interior design in consideration for easiness of making conversation, sound field analysis taking into account the effect of the listener/talker’s direction during conversation should be used. For the purpose, in this study, the calculation method modeling of the shape of head and torso was examined.

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    ITS solutions for traffic safety at intersections to reduce half the national traffic accidents have been anticipated, while the matured ASV technologies requiring car-to-car communications remain to be commercialized due to the delay of diffusing dedicated on-board units. Thus this paper discussed applications realized with ITS-assigned frequency bands, assuming preceding equipment of on-board units into public transport such as LRT or buses. The safety impact of ITS measures for intersections between public transport and private vehicles is also simply estimated.

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    In February 2008, the road marking ‘Optical Dots’ which is one of ‘Sequence Design’ was installed on the two-lane highway in up/downhill at Bijogi Junction zone at Saitama-Ohmiya line in Metropolitan Expressway. We analyzed the transition of recent three years after the installation using the traffic counter’s recording data. The trend of effectiveness and sustainability of Optical Dots’ supported the result we have reported, which showed the observation in reduction in speed [Han, ITS Symp. 2008]. Furthermore the stable speed control effectiveness has been observed without having decline due to the time.

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