Traffic flow modelling

Abstract

Population growth and economic growth come with an increase in traffic demand and—more often than not—increased levels of congestion and accompanying delays, pollution and decrease in safety. There are several strategies to reduce congestion, keep cities liveable, clean and safe and limit travel time increase. Examples are encouraging people to travel using modes of transport that put less strain on the transportation network, to encourage people to travel at different times or on different routes, to apply traffic management to use roads in a more efficient way or to expand the road network. For all these measures, it is important to know how traffic flow will actually look: where and when will there be congestion, what are the bottlenecks and where is the road capacity already sufficient? Traffic flow models support this assessment by describing and predicting traffic on roads. For example, they model the number of vehicles on the road and their speeds. Using the models, travel times and congestion can be predicted.