Drivers traveling on the road usually choose the route which will reduce their own travel time without giving a thought about how this decision will affect other users in the traffic network. Their behaviours leads to problem of oscillating congestion on the roads in the event of traffic disruption. This paper addresses this issue by adopting a competing optimal approach for informed and uninformed drivers. Informed drivers are proposed with alternate routes that reduce the system cost while uninformed drivers continue their journey on originally proposed routes. This strategy of dispersing traffic can reduce congestion significantly. The framework is implemented using Transmodeler, a traffic simulation by experimenting with varying percentage of informed drivers in the network.
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Planned Special Event Network Optimization Model Considering Parking and Ridesharing Drop-Off
A planned special event (PSE), such as a sports game or a concert, can greatly affect the normal operations of a transportation system. To facilitate traffic, the road network is usually reconfigured, which could include road closures, reversed lanes, and limited access to parking facilities. For recurring PSEs, event-goers are often provided with recommended routes to designated parking areas in advance. Such network reconfiguration and route and parking recommendations are, however, often ad hoc in practice. This paper focuses on the PSE traffic planning problem. We propose to simultaneously consider parking, ridesharing, and network configuration. The problem is formulated as an optimization problem with integer decision variables. We developed a flow-based traffic simulation tool that is able to incorporate parking and lane changing (which cannot be ignored around ridesharing drop-off locations) to evaluate the objective function. We also developed effective and efficient heuristic solution algorithms. The models and algorithms are tested using the real network and traffic data from Super Bowl XLIX in 2015. The results show that our methods and approaches are able to produce an effective comprehensive traffic plan with reasonable computation time. For the Super Bowl XLIX case study, the resulting optimal plan is able to save 39.6% of the total vehicle-hours associated with default network configurations. Sensitivity analysis has also been conducted with respect to the compliance rate of travelers following recommended routes. It is found that the resulting near-optimal PSE traffic plans are able to tolerate some uncertainty in the compliance rate.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10374689
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
- Volume:
- 2676
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0361-1981
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 227-242
- Size(s):
- p. 227-242
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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