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EPSRC Reference: GR/L80904/01
Title: A MORE FLEXIBLE FRAMEWORK FOR MODELLING TIME-VARYING TRAFFIC ON ROAD NETWORKS
Principal Investigator: Carey, Professor M
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Sch of Business Organisation & Man
Organisation: University of Ulster
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 14 February 1998 Ends: 13 November 2001 Value (£): 132,220
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Transport Ops & Management
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
Traffic congestion is expected to increase for the forseable future, necessitiating improved methods of managing and modelling it. These are currently two main approaches to modelling and predicting traffic flow varying over time on congested road networks (refered to as dynamic traffic assignment (dta)). These are mathematical programming and simulation, both of which have well known deficiencies. We propse to develop a new framwork which will combine advantages of these existing appraoches. Mathematical programming (mp) has desirable properties, but to make it tractable for network dta (eg retain linear constraints) existing mp models for dta have to treat the key components in congestion (link flows) crudely. As a result, existing mp modles for dta are little used in practice and have been subjected to increasing criticism. Based on our recent research we propose to overcome these problems aby decomposing the dta problem into a simple network flow mp, which coordinated flow across the network and a set of submodels (one for each link) describing time-varying inflow/outflows, trip-time, fifo etc on each link. To solve for a ue or so we iterate between these componets until mutually consistent solutions are found. This decomposition approach retains tractability of the mp, while allowing the links to flow ( and their interaction) to be modelled in as much complexity, detail and realism as we wish. Our initial experiments with this approach have been vbery sucessful, and we have devised iterative srategies which show rapid convergence to desired solutions. We propose to further develop, test and demonstrate this approach, provide theoretical foundations , examine convergence, types of solution etc.
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Organisation Website: http://www.ulst.ac.uk