Overview
To counter rising traffic costs and congestion in Ireland, north and south, and throughout Europe, more sophisticated methods and models are required to understand, predict, control and manage traffic flows and travel times on road networks, and to evaluate proposed investments in transport infrastructure.
Models of traffic varying over time on a road network (i.e. dynamic traffic assignment or DTA) have been developed but it is accepted that all have significant or substantial shortcomings.
The proposed research would pursue a number of directions for overcoming these deficiencies. In existing DTA models, the flows and travel-times do not fit well with traffic flow theory, the models do not handle congested traffic or traffic controls properly (or at all), and models using link travel-times have not been extended to find congestion externalities or optimal road use pricing.
To address these problems, the project will:
- introduce a new, recently developed, link travel-time model into DTA;
- refine existing DTA models by using finite discretisation of link flows, together with parallelising the network computations to retain tractability;
- and extend the same models to handle road use (congestion) pricing, traffic controls and planning.
This work would utilise the existing research strengths and achievements of the proposed partners.