A Multiscale Framework for Forecasting Highway Traffic Flow

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Residential and commercial)
Not Energy Related

Basic and strategic applied research

SOCIAL SCIENCES (Town and Country Planning)
PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Computer Science and Informatics)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Civil Engineering)

Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Consumer attitudes and behaviour)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Other sociological economical and environmental impact of energy)

Dr RE Wilson
Faculty of Engineering and the Environment
University of Southampton

Standard

EPSRC

01 October 2010

30 September 2012

24 months

£276,251

Mathematical sciences

South East

NC : Engineering

Dr RE Wilson, Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton

Project Contact, KTN for Industrial Mathematics
Project Contact, Highways Agency
Project Contact, TRL Ltd (Transport Research Laboratory)

Traffic jams are an annoying feature of everyday life. They also hamper our economy: the CBI has estimated that delays due to road traffic congestion cost UK businesses up to 20 billion annually. UK road traffic is forecast to grow by 30% in the period 2000-2015, so it seems that the congestion problem can only get worse. There is consequently an intense international effort in using Information and Communication Technologies to manage traffic in order to alleviate congestion --- this broad area is known as Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Regular motorway drivers will already be familiar with ITS. Examples include 1. the Controlled Motorways project on the M25 London Orbital (which sets temporary reduced speed limits when the traffic gets heavy); 2. Active Traffic Management on Birmingham's M42 (where the hard-shoulder becomes an ordinary running lane in busy periods); and 3. The `Queue Ahead'warning signs which are now almost ubiquitous on the English motorway network. The investment in this telematics infrastructure has been very significant --- about 100 million pounds for Active Traffic Management alone.Each of the ITS applications described above has at its heart detailed mathematical and computer models that forecast how traffic flows and how queues build up and dissipate. However, these models are far from perfect, and the purpose of this research is to improve the models by working on the fundamental science that underpins them. This a so-called multiscale challenge, since there is a whole hierarchy of models of different levels of detail, ranging from simulation models that model the behaviour of individual drivers, up to macroscopic models that draw an analogy between the flow of traffic and compressible gas. This research will establish methods for finding out which models are good and which ones are bad. Moreover, it will use modern `machine learning' techniques to combine good models so that computer-based traffic forecasting has human-like artificial intelligence

21/09/11