Automated planning for urban traffic management

Abstract

The global growth in urbanisation increases the demand for services including road transport infrastructure, presenting challenges in terms of mobility. Optimising the exploitation of urban road network, while attempting to minimise the effects of traffic emissions, is a great challenge. SimplyfAI was a UK research council grant funded project which was aimed towards solving air quality problems caused by road traffic emissions. Large cities such as Manchester struggle to meet air quality limits as the range of available traffic management devices is limited. In the study, we investigated the application of linked data to enrich environmental and traffic data feeds, and we used this with automated planning tools to enable traffic to be managed at a region level. The management will have the aim of avoiding air pollution problems before they occur. This demo focuses on the planning component, and in particular the engineering and validation aspects, that were pivotal for the success of the project.