The purpose of this project is to make clear which resilience indicators are best to use for different purposes, and to find which of these indicators is best used to find the resilience in road and other transport network. The project also investigates the relation between the resilience of a large network and the resilience of its sub-networks. Futhermore, the relation with network design will be established.
Driving behaviour can be expressed as lateral and longitudinal actions. The latter mainly refers to the well-known car-following model. Pre-signals is a form of signal control for which vehicles are stopped before the actual intersection to make the capacity of the movements on the intersection larger. Lateral driving behaviour at pre-signalised intersections is unknown, because lane-change behaviour at such intersections differ from the common pattern at signalized intersections without a pre-signal. Drivers in the sorted area are confronted with an unfamiliar lane choice. This project investigates that lane choice behaviour.
Switching from human-driven vehicles (HDV) to automated vehicles (AV) is assumed to decrease emissions, improve safety and traffic delay. Before the period of only AVs will start, there will be a hybrid period in which HDV and AVs share the road. The question is how existing traffic signal controllers can cope with this situation and how can the operation of local controllers can improve if the possibilities of AVs to communicate are taken into account. For this project vehicle actuated signal control as practiced in the Netherlands is investigated. Possibilities to better deal with the combination of HDVs and AVs… Read More »Traffic signal control in the transition from manual to automated driving
Congestion has continued to increase during the previous decades. Flexible working helps reducing the increase of congestion, but did not provide enough peak travel demand reduction to avoid congestion until March 2020. Following up on the COVID-19 outbreak, flexible working increased rapidly and congestion disappeared. However, it is unsure if this travel behaviour change will be permanent, or people will fall back in their previous behavioural patterns. Based on a conceptual model for attitude changes it is hypothesized that attitudes could be changed during the pandemic. Because of these changed attitudes, travel behaviour and the build environment can change. This… Read More »Policy strategy design to stimulate flexible working
Even though a lot of automated driving systems are on the market, the need to resolve traffic congestion and to increase the road capacity through intelligent transport systems is still the topic of discussion among the scientists and researchers in the automotive industry. ACC and CACC may have provided the start for automation on roads and vehicle platooning research proved to be fruitful, but all these automation developments were only focused on freeways and highways. While, the automation in the urban traffic situation is still an area for research. Intersections have a major influence on traffic. They are the primary… Read More »Control strategy for truck platoons at signalised intersections
Travel demand in terms of an Origin-Destination (OD) matrix is an essential input for network traffic assignment and traffic simulation models. Several different methods that estimate OD matrices exist. For most of them, a-priori information (in the form of matrices) is necessary. Until this day, that information has been acquired from noncurrent data sources, such as household surveys and road interviews. Due to possible changes in the network or the traffic demand there is no guarantee that these data are still accurate. The quality of OD matrix estimations depends largely on the quality of the input data. This project aimes at improving… Read More »Dynamic OD matrix estimation using floating car data
Currently, Rijkswaterstaat employs an algorithm for detecting incidents on a limited number of road sections. This algorithm is based on detecting a sharp reduction in traffic flow downstream incidents. In this project, the current algorithm is compared to alternative algorithms. Alternative algorithms were e.g. found in North America, where a lot of research has been done on automatic incident detection. Alternative algoritms were also developed as part of the research. Here, the distribution was of traffic over lanes was used as an indicator of traffic state. In case of unexpected changes in this state, the occurrence of incidents may be… Read More »Incident detection with loop data
Fastlane is a software tool that can can be used for short term prediction of the traffic flow on freeways. The online version of Fastlane can be used for example by control centres to test several scenarios after an incident has occured. The operational processes in Fastlane Online can be split up in two parts. First a state estimate has to be made: what is the situation at this moment? Thereafter it computes and visualizes the new state after implementation of a scenario. In this project the focus is on the second part: modelling and prediction of the traffic flow.… Read More »FastLane: modelling and simulation of traffic flow
The harbour of Rotterdam is one of the largest harbours in the world. To maintain this position accessibility by road and waterway is of vital importance. Due to the increasing movement of freigth the accessibility becomes a problem. And this problem will grow due to spatial developments, such as the construction of the second Maasvlakte. Especially the A15 motorway suffers from daily congestion and a large number of incidents. Because of the high percentage of trucks in the traffic flow, these incidents cause a lot of extra congestion. An extra complication is the lack of motorway alternatives for the A15. … Read More »Alternative routes A15 Maasvlakte – Vaanplein
A project has been started to investigate methods for determining bottlenecks in road networks due to incidents. Various methods are possible to estimate the cost in terms of delay and casualties caused by incidents. These methods all need reliable input. However, obtaining accurate and reliable data on incidents is cumbersome due to the irregular nature of incidents. When the costs of bottlenecks have been determined, a ranked list of ‘high risk’ or of ‘nonproductive’ road sections is available. In order to optimize network performance the task of the road manager is to improve these bottlenecks. However, it is crucial to have… Read More »Bottlenecks in road networks due to incidents