This book explains in detail the advantages and limitations of network analysis applied to transportation problems.

This book offers a detailed investigation of breakdowns in traffic and transportation networks. It shows empirically that transitions from free flow to so-called synchronized flow, initiated by local disturbances at network bottlenecks, display a nucleation-type behavior: while small disturbances in free flow decay, larger ones grow further and lead to breakdowns at the bottlenecks. Further, it discusses in detail the significance of this nucleation effect for traffic and transportation theories, and the consequences this has for future automatic driving, traffic control, dynamic traffic assignment, and optimization in traffic and transportation networks. Starting from a large volume of field traffic data collected from various sources obtained solely through measurements in real world traffic, the author develops his insights, with an emphasis less on reviewing existing methodologies, models and theories, and more on providing a detailed analysis of empirical traffic data and drawing consequences regarding the minimum requirements for any traffic and transportation theories to be valid. The book - proves the empirical nucleation nature of traffic breakdown in networks - discusses the origin of the failure of classical traffic and transportation theories - shows that the three-phase theory is incommensurable with the classical traffic theories, and - explains why current state-of-the art dynamic traffic assignments tend to provoke heavy traffic congestion, making it a valuable reference resource for a wide audience of scientists and postgraduate students interested in the fundamental understanding of empirical traffic phenomena and related data-driven phenomenology, as well as for practitioners working in the fields of traffic and transportation engineering.

This text provides a comprehensive and concise treatment of the topic of traffic flow theory and includes several topics relevant to today’s highway transportation system. It provides the fundamental principles of traffic flow theory as well as applications of those principles for evaluating specific types of facilities (freeways, intersections, etc.). Newer concepts of Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and their potential impact on traffic flow are discussed. State-of-the-art in traffic flow research and microscopic traffic analysis and traffic simulation have significantly advanced and are also discussed in this text. Real world examples and useful problem sets complement each chapter. This textbook is meant for use in advanced undergraduate/graduate level courses in traffic flow theory with prerequisites including two semesters of calculus, statistics, and an introductory course in transportation. The text would also be of interest to transportation professionals as a refresher in traffic flow theory, or as a reference. Students and engineers of diverse backgrounds will find this text accessible and applicable to today’s traffic issues.

Creating Traffic Models is a challenging task because some of their interactions and system components are difficult to adequately express in a mathematical form. Traffic Flow Theory: Characteristics, Experimental Methods, and Numerical Techniques provide traffic engineers with the necessary methods and techniques for mathematically representing traffic flow. The book begins with a rigorous but easy to understand exposition of traffic flow characteristics including Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and traffic sensing technologies. - Includes worked out examples and cases to illustrate concepts, models, and theories - Provides modeling and analytical procedures for supporting different aspects of traffic analyses for supporting different flow models - Carefully explains the dynamics of traffic flow over time and space

Urban mobility is not only one of the pillars of modern economic systems, but also a key issue in the quest for equality of opportunity, once it can improve access to other services. Currently, however, there are a number of negative issues related to traffic, especially in mega-cities, such as economical issues (cost of opportunity caused by delays), environmental (externalities related to emissions of pollutants), and social (traffic accidents). Solutions to these issues are more and more closely tied to information and communication technology. Indeed, a search in the technical literature (using the keyword ``urban traffic" to filter out articles on data network traffic) retrieved the following number of articles (as of December 3, 2013): 9,443 (ACM Digital Library), 26,054 (Scopus), and 1,730,000 (Google Scholar). Moreover, articles listed in the ACM query relate to conferences as diverse as MobiCom, CHI, PADS, and AAMAS. This means that there is a big and diverse community of computer scientists and computer engineers who tackle research that is connected to the development of intelligent traffic and transportation systems. It is also possible to see that this community is growing, and that research projects are getting more and more interdisciplinary. To foster the cooperation among the involved communities, this book aims at giving a broad introduction into the basic but relevant concepts related to transportation systems, targeting researchers and practitioners from computer science and information technology. In addition, the second part of the book gives a panorama of some of the most exciting and newest technologies, originating in computer science and computer engineering, that are now being employed in projects related to car-to-car communication, interconnected vehicles, car navigation, platooning, crowd sensing and sensor networks, among others. This material will also be of interest to engineers and researchers from the traffic and transportation community.

This book presents many valuable tips for making decisions related to traffic flow in the transport networks. The knowledge base in practical examples, as well as the decision support systems described in this book, finds interest among people who face the daily challenge of searching for solutions to the problems of contemporary transport networks and systems. The publication is therefore addressed to local authorities related to the planning and development of development strategies for selected areas with regard to transport (both in the urban and regional dimension) and to representatives of business and industry, as people directly involved in the implementation of traffic engineering solutions. The tips contained in individual sections of the publication allow to look at a given problem in an advanced way and facilitate the selection of the appropriate strategy (among others, in relation to the evaluation of BEV and FCHEV electric vehicles in the creation of a sustainable transport systems, development of ecological public transport on the example of selected cities, impact of drivers' waiting time on the gap acceptance at median, uncontrolled T-intersections). In turn, due to a new approach to theoretical models (including, inter alia, the application of genetic algorithms for the planning of urban rail transportation system, comprehensive estimate of life cycle costs of new technical systems using reliability verification algorithm, application and comparison of machine learning algorithms in traffic signals prediction), the publication also interests scientists and researchers carrying out research in this area.

This textbook provides a comprehensive and instructive coverage of vehicular traffic flow dynamics and modeling. It makes this fascinating interdisciplinary topic, which to date was only documented in parts by specialized monographs, accessible to a broad readership. Numerous figures and problems with solutions help the reader to quickly understand and practice the presented concepts. This book is targeted at students of physics and traffic engineering and, more generally, also at students and professionals in computer science, mathematics, and interdisciplinary topics. It also offers material for project work in programming and simulation at college and university level. The main part, after presenting different categories of traffic data, is devoted to a mathematical description of the dynamics of traffic flow, covering macroscopic models which describe traffic in terms of density, as well as microscopic many-particle models in which each particle corresponds to a vehicle and its driver. Focus chapters on traffic instabilities and model calibration/validation present these topics in a novel and systematic way. Finally, the theoretical framework is shown at work in selected applications such as traffic-state and travel-time estimation, intelligent transportation systems, traffic operations management, and a detailed physics-based model for fuel consumption and emissions.

"This book aims at giving a complete panorama of the active and promising crossing area between traffic engineering and multi-agent system addressing both current status and challenging new ideas"--Provided by publisher.

This book collects selected presentations of the Meeting of the EURO Working Group on Transportation, which took place at the Department of Ma- ematics at Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg (or, Gothenburg), Sweden, September 9–11, 1998. [The EURO Working Group on Transpor- tion was founded at the end of the 7th EURO Summer Institute on Urban Traffic Management, which took place in Cetraro, Italy, June 21–July, 1991. There were around 30 founding members of the Working Group, a number which now has grown to around 150. Meetings since then include Paris (1993), Barcelona (1994), and Newcastle (1996). ] About 100 participants were present, enjoying healthy rain and a memorable conference dinner in the Feskekôrka. The total number of presentations at the conference was about 60, coming from quite diverse areas within the field of operations research in transportation, and covering all modes of transport: Deterministic traffic equilibrium models (6 papers) Stochastic traffic equilibrium models (5 papers) Combined traffic models (3 papers) Dynamic traffic models (7 papers) Simulation models (4 papers) Origin–destination matrix estimation (2 papers) Urban public transport models (8 papers) Aircraft scheduling (1 paper) Ship routing (2 papers) Railway planning and scheduling (6 papers) Vehicle routing (3 papers) Traffic management (3 papers) Signal control models (3 papers) Transportation systems analysis (5 papers) ix x TRANSPORTATION PLANNING Among these papers, 14 were eventually selected to be included in this volume.