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Simulation-Based Operations Planning for Regional Transportation Systems

Why Do Operations Planning?

Congestion in surface transportation systems has reached unprecedented levels, and is now costing tens of billions of dollars in delays and wasted fuel every year. Vehicle emissions are a major source of air pollution in cities world-wide. Natural and man-made disasters can create gridlock in the transportation infrastructure, impeding travelers, goods, and emergency vehcicles and personnel.

Information technology can, and is, playing a major role in alleviating these problems. This project is concerned with the development and application of novel high performance modeling and simulation techniques and tools to design and manage regional transportation systems. A federated, on-line simulation approach is used to integrate tools for forecasting travel demands with detailed, microscopic simulation of the transportation infrastructure in order to achieve much more reliable projections of transportation system behavior than is possible using these tools in isolation.

What Can We Add to Existing Operations Planning?

Research in simulation techniques will focus on the realization of efficient integrated on-line simulations for operations planning. Two techniques, in particular, will be investigated:
  1. Updateable Simulations
  2. Reservation Systems
This research will also leverage our test bed research in order to adequately test these techniques against a simulated transportation infrastructure.

Who Is Funding This Research?

This research is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of a 3 year ITR project ( #0219976).