Towards an integrated urban development considering novel intelligent transportation systems

Abstract Urban areas are currently facing new and enormous challenges: urbanization, connected and automated land and air transport with new demand for transport and logistic services, maintenance of more complex traffic and supply infrastructure as well as mandatory digitalization of cadastral information under the constraints of limited space and resources. Different stakeholders are interested in using detailed, precise and up-to-date data about the urban environment. These stakeholders are not only governmental bodies, road operators and (public) fleet managers but also companies that are interested in testing and operating new intelligent transportation systems and connected and automated vehicles in realistic and complex urban simulation environments. This article proposes a concept of how to tackle this complex task based on approaches already conducted in the domain of the development and test of automated driving and city modeling. Core elements of this thesis are an all-embracing geo-database, a toolchain to import, validate, process and fuse the necessary data as well as interfaces and data formats for automated data exchange. The feasibility and challenges as well as the potential and synergies of implementing of this concept are discussed by analyzing similar solutions in the key domains. The article concludes with a proposal to realize such a concept.