At the Abu Dhabi Integrated Transport Centre (ITC), the availability of new data has driven rapid advancements for the existing Strategic Transportation Evaluation and Assessment Model (STEAM).
STEAM is now STEAM+, a ground-breaking transport modelling framework, which integrates the original strategic modelling approach with new Aimsun hybrid mesoscopic-microscopic models and near-real-time simulation.
The ITC is linking big datasets including day-to-day anonymized mobile phone tracking, water/electricity consumption by household, live bus, and taxi fleets, building and plot level municipal data, as well as a comprehensive population and employment data set. This is a hugely ambitious project on a never-before-attempted scale, covering the entire Abu Dhabi Emirate.
The new multi-tiered STEAM+ Framework allows assessment of schemes ranging from specific intersections to large infrastructure studies, transit corridors and policy tests. It complements the current regional strategic model with more detailed, dynamic assessment of flow metering at junctions, traffic queuing, ITS and emerging technologies, bus priority schemes and light rail (LRT) delays at junctions.
The three pillars of the STEAM+ Framework are the big data warehouse, the multi-tiered model, and the visualization tool, as shown in the diagram below.