Overview
Demand for transport has been increasing rapidly in urban areas. Increasing capacity by further construction of road is no longer economic or acceptable by society. Traffic control and management systems aim at the efficient use of the existing road infrastructure. They have shown benefits in reducing trip times and externalities. A key requirement is their responsiveness to variations in traffic conditions and allowing the possibility of network managers to evaluate strategies to cope with these variations. Prediction of how the traffic flows will develop is essential to managing traffic and providing reliable driver information. This needs to be integrated in traffic control systems
The overall objective of HIPERTRANS was to produce a microscopic modelling and simulation tool for the easy and cost-effective development of road traffic control systems and for the effective management of traffic flows on road networks.
The HIPERTRANS specific objectives were to:
- develop a simulator able to interact with Urban Traffic Control (UTC) systems at real time speeds and develop a predictor consistent with users' requirement for look-ahead;
- implement a low-cost high performance computer-based system and demonstrate that this can speed up and improve the operation of urban road transportation networks.
Funding
Results
The main products of the project have been:
- a real-time simulator able to provide the operator with the current state of traffic in the road network and to interact with UTC systems at real-time speeds,
- a real time predictor using high-performance computing able to warn the network manager of the potential development of traffic conditions.
The HIPERTRANS products are innovative in several respects:
- the powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI) for entering the model, configuring the simulation and visualising the result;
- the real-time traffic simulator has been interconnected with two types of UTC: SCOOT and STU;
- the predictor can execute prediction runs faster than real-time; the use of scalable parallel computing has shown that faster than real-time criterion can be met irrespective of the size and complexity of the modelled network, e.g. in dealing with traffic incidents and events and evaluating the consequences of emergencies or operator intervention.
Policy implications
The HIPERTRANS project has shown that microscopic simulation can be one of the most effective tools in the specification, design, commissioning and operation of UTC systems. The results of the real-time simulator and predictor will be useful for traffic consultants and policy makers to rapidly assess and visualise the effects of new strategies and novel policies in the planning and management of networks. The tool enables transportation network and UTC operators to assess the performance of their network under a variety of operational conditions and behavioural patterns, and to examine the future effect of their selected actions fast enough, to be able to revise and re-test the performance before selecting the best action to take.
The market analysis and evaluation of the product and service opportunities emerging from the project have shown promising results in terms of potential market for both the SCOOT- and STU-based UTC systems. The availability of powerful but cheap personal computers is expected to facilitate the use of the predictor tool. Further research should be carried out into the effective exploitation of distributed computing, to speed up the simulation further, in realistic road networks. Future projects should aim at integrating the distributed executions with more user-friendly graphical and animation interfaces, and the simulation technology with the technology of real-time UTC systems.
The market analysis and evaluation of the product and service opportunities emerging from the project have shown promising results in terms of potential market for both the SCOOT- and STU-based UTC systems. The availability of powerful but cheap personal computers is expected to facilitate the use of the predictor tool. Further research should be carried out into the effective exploitation of distributed computing, to speed up the simulation further, in realistic road networks. Future projects should aim at integrating the distributed executions with more user-friendly graphical and animation interfaces, and the simulation technology with the technology of real-time UTC systems.