Network vulnerability and traffic management strategies under adverse weather conditions

• Forschungsstelle: COST
• Projektnummer: C08.0134
• Projekttitel Englisch: Network vulnerability and traffic management strategies under adverse weather conditions

Schlüsselwörter (Englisch)

Network vulnerability; network reliability; traffic management; risk management

Forschungsprogramme (Englisch)

COST-Action TU0702 - Real-time monitoring, surveillance and control of road networks under adverse weather conditions

Kurzbeschreibung (Englisch)

Climate change could cause a rise in global temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees this century and this could have catastrophic consequences for vast areas of the globe in the future as there would be greater risks of increased frequency of adverse weather events. This includes more droughts, hurricanes, bushfires and coastal flooding. Little attention has been given to the potential impacts of climate change on urban transportation systems and how such adverse weather events affect the performance of urban transportation networks as integrated systems. The main goals of this project are to develop indices/metrics for assessing network vulnerability and to mitigate the negative impacts of adverse weather conditions on traffic flows under adverse weather conditions. The term of ‘adverse weather conditions’ refers to the meteorological conditions that decrease the visibility and worsen the road conditions. This project assesses the potential impact of climate change on the system-wide performance of transportation networks using Switzerland as a case study. Metrics pertinent for assessment of adverse weather impacts on transport network will be defined. Mesoscopic simulation model for Swiss road network will be developed and applied to access the network vulnerability. Once adverse weather events are assessed, traffic management strategies will be built to mitigate those effects when the level of service of the affected area is low. The developed traffic management strategies will be evaluated based on the strategies efficiency and costs of road closures such as change in vehicle operating cost and lost of user benefit from cancelled trips.

Weitere Hinweise und Angaben (Englisch)

Full name of research-institution/enterprise: EPF Lausanne Département de Génie civil LAVOC Laboratoire des voies de circulation

Partner und Internationale Organisationen (Englisch)

AT, BE, CH, DE, ES, FI, FR, GR, IS, NL, PL, PT, SE, TR, UK

Abstract (Englisch)

Addressing the reliability enhancement as a determining issue for the quality of a network and focalizing at the quantification of its weather-dependent features for the impact assessment and travel time estimation, consist the fundamental topics of the current project. Traffic management methods are developed within it for the unveiling of weather-responsive functions that would mitigate the negative impacts of adverse weather conditions on traffic demand, capacity and safety at both inter-regional/freeway and urban networks in a microscopic scale. In the initial part of the project an analysis of the weather impact on motorway traffic will be elaborated. The traffic simulation completion, considering the weather, and the study of a plausible network capacity increase by the amelioration of the relationship between speed, flow and density, are aiming to the minimization of the possibilities for accident emergence, namely the network's vulnerability. In that scope, a methodology has been developed for the linkage of several traffic parameters to rainfall intensity. The traffic-oriented parameters that served as under examination elements for the calibration of the Gipps car-following model, were the headway, the flow and lane number. The empirical and the simulated headway distributions were compared using the optimization implement of genetic algorithm and the statistical of the Kolomogorov-Smirnov (KS) test. Following the comparison performed by the objective (fitness) function, an optimal set of parameters of the car-following model were acquired, namely the mean and deviation of desired speed, maximum acceleration and deceleration, normal deceleration, sensitivity factor, minimum headway, minimum distance between vehicle, minimum safety distance and simulation step. The subsequent developments are the simulation of weather events in various scenarios in order to optimize the traffic management strategies under adverse weather conditions and define the network's resilience and vulnerability, such as the implementation of variable speed limit (VSL), of variable message sign (VMS) in capacity decrease and low level of service (LOS).

Datenbankreferenzen (Englisch)

Swiss Database: COST-DB of the State Secretariat for Education and Research Hallwylstrasse 4 CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland Tel. [phone] Swiss Project-Number: C08.0134