An Automated Detection Framework for Multiple Highway Bottleneck Activations

Highway bottlenecks are responsible for the majority of traffic congestion. Although the problem of bottleneck detection is not new, contemporary methods have not solved the problem thoroughly with regards to bottleneck locations, activation time, and related congestion tracking. These elements are essential for identifying and characterizing a...

Understanding bikeability: a methodology to assess urban networks

A fully separated bicycle network from vehicular traffic is not realistic even for the most bicycle-friendly cities. Thus, all around the world urban cycling entails switching between streets of different safety, convenience, and comfort levels. As a consequence, the quality of bicycle networks should be evaluated not based on one but multiple...

Macroscopic pedestrian flow simulation using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)

Macroscopic pedestrian models are theoretically simpler than microscopic models, and they can potentially be solved faster while producing reasonable predictions of crowd dynamics. Therefore, they can be very useful for applications such as large-scale simulation, real-time state estimation and crowd management. However, the numerical methods...

Feature extraction and clustering analysis of highway congestion

Classification of congestion patterns is important in many areas in traffic planning and management, ranging from policy appraisal, database design, to prediction and real-time control. One of the key constraints in applying machine learning techniques for classification is the availability of sufficient data (traffic patterns) with clear and...

A Hierarchical Control Framework for Coordination of Intersection Signal Timings in All Traffic Regimes

In this paper, we develop a hierarchical approach to optimize the signal timings in an urban traffic network taking into account the different dynamics in all traffic regimes. The proposed hierarchical control framework consists of two layers. The first layer--the network coordination layer--uses a model predictive control strategy based on a...