SocialCars - DFG GRK 1931
(since 2014): The objective of the SocialCars Research Training Group (GRK 1931) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) researches new models, methods and applications of decentralized, cooperative traffic management, that are enabled by new technological trends and developments such as Automated Driving and Car-to-X communication. SocialCars focuses on the interplay of centralized management in the sense of classical traffic control, and decentralized management in the sense of the local goals of individual traffic participants.
The RTG is physically located at the Niedersächsisches Forschungszentrum Fahrzeugtechnik (NFF). At the same time, the students have a workspace at their home institutes, which serves to foster their embedding in their own discipline. This substantially expands the qualification opportunities in the strategic research focus Sustainable Mobility.
So far, the following phd theses were completed by members of the MEC group in the project in the project:
- Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Jana Görmer-Redding. Autonomous vehicle groups in urban traffic (2018).
- Dr. rer. nat. Sophie Dennisen. Towards cooperative urban traffic management: Investigating voting for travel groups (2021).
- Dr. rer. nat. Sinziana-Maria Sebe. Distributed, decentralised and compensational Mechanisms for Platoon Formation (2021).
- Dr. rer. nat. Fatema Tuj Johora. Modeling interactions among pedestrians and cars in shared spaces (2021).
Ongoing phd thesis projects supported by the SocialCars RTG are:
- Awad Mukbil, M.Sc. Modeling of cyclists' behaviour and interactions in shared spaces.
- Sören Schleibaum, M.Sc. Explainable AI methods for shared mobility applications.
- Yasin Yousef, M.Sc. Multiagent learning for mixed traffic prediction tasks.
Also see https://socialcars.github.io for documentation of the research artifacts.
* Acknowledgment: Prof. Bernhard Friedrich created the amazing hand-drawn picture of a SocialCars vision scenario used on this page.
