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Traffic Reservation Systems

Brad Fitzgibbons

Richard M. Fujimoto

Modeling and simulation research and tools will be applied to a case study focused on studying a novel concept based on using reservations for roadway usage to manage major arteries in an urban transportation infrastructure. Most current Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) operate on the premise of providing motorists with up-to-date travel information (e.g., congestion warnings or notification of incidents) and/or advice (e.g., recommended routes) so that individual travelers can independently optimize their own personal plans. With this approach the ITS has little control over the demands placed on the transportation system, making it very difficult to ensure that delay and throughput objectives are achieved. We propose another paradigm that augments transportation information systems with a reservation system to help manage traveler demands to reduce the liklihood that travel loads exceed system capacity, and to achieve a more uniform distribution of demand across time, thereby lessening the severity of peaks in load. An objective of the reservation system is to yield a more predictable transportation infrastructure with reduced delay and delay variance. The case study will focus on modeling a hypothetical reservation system to be deployed in the Atlanta metropolitan area. This study will utilize data being collected under a separate, on-going project that is characterizing traveler behavior in the Atlanta area.