Planning and Scheduling Transportation Vehicle Fleet in a Congested Traffic Environment

Transportation is a main component of supply chain competitiveness since it plays a major role in the inbound, inter-facility, and outbound logistics. In this context, assigning and scheduling vehicle routing is a crucial management problem. Despite numerous publications dealing with efficient scheduling methods for vehicle routing, very few addressed the inherent stochastic nature of travel times in this problem. In this paper, a vehicle routing problem with time windows and stochastic travel times due to potential traffic congestion is considered. The approach developed introduces mainly the traffic congestion component based on queueing theory. This is an innovative modeling scheme to capture the stochastic behavior of travel times. A case study is used both to illustrate the appropriateness of the approach as well as to show that time-independent solutions are often unrealistic within a congested traffic environment which is often the case on the european road networkstransportation; vehicle fleet; planning; scheduling; congested traffic

Economic Determinants of Driver's Behavior in Minas Gerais

The aim of the paper is to evaluate the behavior of drivers when they face a safe-traffic environment. Some studies suggest that the laws that demand auto makers to produce safer vehicles also stimulate their drivers to drive carelessly, since the cost of driving carefully decreases. Likewise, a safer traffic environment or less dangerous surroundings can stimulate drivers to drive more aggressively and less carefully. This study tries to test whether the undesirable behavior described by Peltzman (1975) is observed on the highways and roads of the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Estimates based on data found in the Brazilian Federal Road Police's accident report databank confirm drivers'' lack of attention in safer environments. The results suggest that careless behavior in traffic increases when safer conditions prevail.

Traffic3d:A rich 3D-traffic environment to train intelligent agents

The last few years marked a substantial development in the domain of Deep Reinforcement Learning. However, a crucial and not yet fully achieved objective is to devise intelligent agents which can be successfully taken out of the laboratory and employed in the real world. Intelligent agents that are successfully deployable in true physical settings, require substantial prior exposure to their intended environments. When this is not practical or possible, the agents benefit from being trained and tested on powerful test-beds, effectively replicating the real world. To achieve traffic management at an unprecedented level of efficiency, in this paper, we introduce a significantly richer new traffic simulation environment; Traffic3D. Traffic3D is a unique platform built to effectively simulate and evaluate a variety of 3D-road traffic scenarios, closely mimicking real-world traffic characteristics including faithful simulation of individual vehicle behavior, precise physics of movement and photo-realism. We discuss the merits of Traffic3D in comparison to state-of-the-art traffic-based simulators. Along with deep reinforcement learning, Traffic3D facilitates research across various domains such as object detection and segmentation, unsupervised representation learning, visual question answering, procedural generation, imitation learning and learning by interaction

Influence of virtual reality training on the roadside crossing judgements of child pedestrians

The roadside crossing judgments of children aged 7, 9, and 11 years were assessed relative to controls before and after training with a computer-simulated traffic environment. Trained children crossed more quickly, and their estimated crossing times became better aligned with actual crossing times. They crossed more promptly, missed fewer safe opportunities to cross, accepted smaller traffic gaps without increasing the number of risky crossings, and showed better conceptual understanding of the factors to be considered when making crossing judgments. All age groups improved to the same extent, and there was no deterioration when children were retested 8 months later. The results are discussed in relation to theoretical arguments concerning the extent to which children's pedestrian judgments are amenable to training

The impacts of bus lanes on urban traffic environment

Tese de mestrado. Transportes. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Resilience Modeling of Surface Transportation System in Mixed Traffic Environment

Large-scale natural disasters challenge the resilience of surface transportation system. The objective of this research was to develop a resilience model of surface transportation system in mixed-traffic environment considering varying Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) penetration scenarios. As deployment of CAVs are expected to improve traffic operations, a resilience model was developed in this research to evaluate the resilience performance of a transportation system with several CAV penetration levels (0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%) for a given budget and recovery time. The proposed resilience quantification model was applied on a roadway network considering several disaster scenarios. The network capacity in terms of trips at any phase of disaster was compared to the pre-disaster trips to determine the system resilience. The capacity variation and the travel time variation was also estimated. The analysis showed that the resilience phenomenon of the transportation system improved with CAVs in respect of travel time and capacity improvement. The rate of improvement in link travel time for varied CAV penetration was almost identical for different disaster scenarios. For each disaster scenario, the individual link travel time reduced significantly with increased CAV penetration. However, higher penetration of CAVs (i.e., 50% or more), increased the recovery budget requirement. For example, the recovery budget needed for medium and large-scale disasters were 50% and 90% higher respectively compared to the recovery budget needed for a small-scale disaster. These higher costs were primarily needed for repair and replacement of intelligent infrastructure required for CAV

Psychological Analysis of Degree of Safety in Traffic Environment Design

See this work in the Center for Transportation Research Library catalog: https://library.ctr.utexas.edu/Presto/catalogid=5773Recent on-site accident investigation studies have estimated that between 10 and 25 percent of automobile accidents involve distraction as a principal causative factor. This report presents the findings of a research project designed to study the relationship between visual dis tractors in the roadside environment, such as advertising signs, neon lights, and gaudy billboards, and traffic safety. This project has involved the definition, operationalization, and measurement of visual distractibility in the traffic environment, including an analysis of distractions attributable to private signs and lights in the Vicinity of public signs and signals and of distractions caused by an overload or improper placement of public signs.Texas Office of Traffic SafetyCenter for Transportation ResearchSee this work in the Center for Transportation Research Library catalog

An integrated GPS/PDA/GIS telegeoprocessing system for traffic & environment

The development of sustainable urban transport networks is a present priority for world leaders, national governors and local authorities. The challenge is to increase mobility reducing the adverse impacts of transport. The potential of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to provide solutions for the 21st century sustainable urban transport system has already been demonstrated in several piecewise applications. An integrated framework that addresses the needs of municipal authorities, that integrates the data spread through different sources, that supports the intelligent traffic & environment operations, and that provides information to the citizens steering their involvement and commitment is of critical importance and can be the enabler towards the creation of more efficient, safety, and environmental-friendly transport networks that promote the citizens’ quality of life. This work describes an integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) / PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) / GIS (Geographical Information System) system which is part of the mentioned framework. The system includes prototypes for mobile urban traffic data acquisition, with a GPS -equipped vehicle, a PDA application and wireless communications, and for a geodatabase with a related Web application for urban traffic & environment. Their integrated operation is exemplified for a real urban transport system.Postprint (published version