Wiesbaden: DIGI-V
To improve air quality in the city of Wiesbaden, Aimsun Live forecasts combine with the IMMIS emission model and Siemens’ Sitraffic Concert to assess traffic management strategies in real time.
European Space Agency (ESA)
TRL – University of Leicester – Aimsun
Leicester, UK
2014 – 2017
The uTRAQ project aims at developing, integrating, and demonstrating at the users operational scenario, a system suggesting and provisioning citywide road traffic management strategies to optimize both traffic and air quality conditions. The system uses traffic and air quality data modelling to predict traffic flow scenarios based on transport patterns, traffic management regimes, and emission profiles. uTRAQ emulations of traffic flow are created through the integration of air quality data feeds (satellite-based and from local in-situ sensors) and traffic information feeds (using satellite-derived vehicle location and ground sensors such as road loops); these are ingested to a central computational-intelligence (CI), to trade-off different scenarios and provide traffic management guidance to an advanced traffic management system (i.e. SCOOT).
The Aimsun team’s role is to implement and calibrate an Aimsun Live model of test areas in the UK using data provided by the local authorities. The model will interact with an Air Quality Model (AQM) provided by the University of Leicester and with realtime SCOOT (and other) data to allow UTC strategies to be tested in real time, with the objective of finding strategies that minimise emissions.
UTRAQ has adopted a modular approach as illustrated below, which has integrated data sources both known (traffic data) and new (air quality, meteorological data) into a decision support system that has other modular components, the existing traffic management system and the real time short term prediction of Aimsun Live. Each module serves a specific purpose and has been used in the collection, filtering, processing and analysis of the various data feeds in a coordinated fashion.
In order to calculate the potential benefit of various traffic control strategies (in addition to the likely outcome of a ‘do-nothing’ scenario); the system uses a simple 3 step process:
-Simulation of these strategies using traffic and air quality modeling;
-Identifying an optimal strategy, based on local policy, performance measures and user interaction;
-Passing the optimal strategy to the existing UTC system for real life implementation.
The project ended towards the end of 2017, however Earthsense, a spinoff from the University of Leicester, continues to offer air quality modeling services, and Aimsun continues to deploy Aimsun Live in coordination with traffic management systems.
To improve air quality in the city of Wiesbaden, Aimsun Live forecasts combine with the IMMIS emission model and Siemens’ Sitraffic Concert to assess traffic management strategies in real time.
An Aimsun Live deployment in Oxfordshire, UK with integrated air dispersion modeling.
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