Dynamic Geo-Fencing for Polycentric Congestion Management: A Simulation-Based Analysis

Our cities are growing at an unprecedented pace. The flexible use of metropolitan infrastructures is the key to maintaining, if not increasing, the current quality of life. The combined use of geo-fence technology and connected vehicles can be the tool to achieve this flexibility. In this paper, we take a first step in the evaluation of the...

Distributed Model-Free Adaptive Predictive Control for Urban Traffic Networks

Data-driven control without using mathematical models is a promising research direction for urban traffic control due to the massive amounts of traffic data generated every day. This article proposes a novel distributed model-free adaptive predictive control (D-MFAPC) approach for multiregion urban traffic networks. More specifically, the...

An Analysis of the Factors Influencing the Capacity of Constrained Urban Airspace

The traffic density of small aerial vehicles operating within urban environments is expected to increase significantly in the near future. This urban environment is highly constrained due to being limited to the low-altitude airspace directly above the existing road network. To increase understanding of the factors influencing the capacity of...

How many cars in the city are too many?: Towards finding the optimal modal split for a multi-modal urban road network

Interactions among different modes or vehicle classes in urban road networks affect the network performance in different and complex ways. Thus, an answer to the question of “how many cars are too many for a city?” is not trivial. However, multi-modal macroscopic fundamental diagrams (MFD) offer a novel opportunity to answer this question. So...

Departure rates optimization and perimeter control: Comparison and cooperation in a multi-region urban network

With the renewed interest in the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) in the last decade, studies on network-level urban traffic control have increased in popularity. A popular urban traffic control approach is perimeter control, in which vehicle accumulation is kept below some critical accumulation value. An alternative control strategy is to...

Urban Mobility Observatory

The Urban Mobility Observatory (UMO) will gather, store, and disseminate empirical multi-modal traffic, transport and mobility data, using a well-balanced set of innovative data collection methods. It will make these comprehensive data available for scientific research to develop and test new theories and models to better understand, predict and...

Empirical MFDs using Google Traffic Data

<br/>The Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) describes the relation between accumulation and speed in a zone. While theoretically expected, empirical validations have been done with limited numbers of floating car (e.g., taxi) data, and loop detectors. This paper will verify existence, shape and crispness of the MFD using Floating Car Data ...

Determining the macroscopic fundamental diagram from mixed and partial traffic data

The macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) is a graphical method used to characterize the traffic state in a road network and to monitor and evaluate the effect of traffic management. For the determination of an MFD, both traffic volumes and traffic densities are needed. This study introduces a methodology to determine an MFD using combined...

Using taxi GPS data for macroscopic traffic monitoring in large scale urban networks: Calibration and MFD derivation

A two-Fluid Model (TFM) of urban traffic provides the macroscopic description of traffic state. The TFMs parameters are hard to calibrate, particularly for the dynamic traffic conditions. This leads to the TFM often being used to compare the quality of service through the plot of stopping time versus trip time of the vehicles in the network....

Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram for pedestrian networks: Theory and applications

The Macroscopic Fundamental diagram (MFD) has proven to be a powerful concept in understanding and managing vehicular network dynamics, both from a theoretical angle and from a more application-oriented perspective. In this contribution, we explore the existence and the characteristics of the pedestrian Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (p-MFD)...

An Area-Aggregated Dynamic Traffic Simulation Model

Microscopic and macroscopic dynamic traffic models not fast enough to run in an optimization loop to coordinate traffic measures over areas of twice a trip length (50x50 km). Moreover, in strategic planning there are models with a spatial high level of detail, but lacking the features of traffic dynamics. This paper introduces the Network...

Traffic dynamics: Its impact on the macroscopic fundamental diagram

Literature shows that–under specific conditions–the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) describes a crisp relationship between the average flow (production) and the average density in an entire network. The limiting condition is that traffic conditions must be homogeneous over the whole network. Recent works describe hysteresis effects:...

Macroscopic Traffic Dynamics with Heterogeneous Route Patterns

This paper investigates at an aggregated (macroscopic) scale the effects of route patterns on a road network. Four main variables are considered: the production, the mean speed, the outflow and the mean travel distance. First, a simple network with heterogeneous travel distances between origins and destinationsis studied by simulation. It...

The Effect of Network Structure and Signal Settings on the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram

Recently it has been proposed that the performance of a complete network can be represented graphically using only aggregated data for flow and density. The resulting graph is the macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD), which relates the average flow (performance) to the number of vehicles in the network (accumulation). The resulting shape is...

Data requirements for traffic control on a macroscopic level

With current techniques, traffic monitoring and control is a data intensive process. Network control on a higher level, using high level variables, can make this process less data demanding. The macroscopic fundamental diagram relates accumulation, i.e. the number of vehicles in an area, to the network performance, but only holds for situations...

Application of Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams to Dynamic Traffic Management

This thesis project is a part of Dutch project PraktijkProef Amsterdam (PPA), in which the coordinated network traffic management in the regional area is analyzed. One of control levels in the project PPA is sub-networks, where the concept of the macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) is applied. Unlike a conventional link fundamental diagram, an...