This books reviews and brings readers up to date with the latest research knowledge on road traffic safety. It describes and discusses mathematical descriptions of the process of a motor vehicle crash and indicates the various factors that impact on collision models. It tackles also vehicle stability and shows how the forces generated in crashes result in different extents of post-accident repair. Mathematical models that simulate vehicle stability data are compared with those of real vehicles. Practical uses of the models are explained to readers. The book will be of interest to researchers in transport and vehicle technology well as automotive industry professionals.

This textbook provides a comprehensive and instructive coverage of vehicular traffic flow dynamics and modeling. It makes this fascinating interdisciplinary topic, which to date was only documented in parts by specialized monographs, accessible to a broad readership. Numerous figures and problems with solutions help the reader to quickly understand and practice the presented concepts. This book is targeted at students of physics and traffic engineering and, more generally, also at students and professionals in computer science, mathematics, and interdisciplinary topics. It also offers material for project work in programming and simulation at college and university level. The main part, after presenting different categories of traffic data, is devoted to a mathematical description of the dynamics of traffic flow, covering macroscopic models which describe traffic in terms of density, as well as microscopic many-particle models in which each particle corresponds to a vehicle and its driver. Focus chapters on traffic instabilities and model calibration/validation present these topics in a novel and systematic way. Finally, the theoretical framework is shown at work in selected applications such as traffic-state and travel-time estimation, intelligent transportation systems, traffic operations management, and a detailed physics-based model for fuel consumption and emissions.

The MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) software project was started around 2006 with the goal of generating traffic and congestion patterns by following individual synthetic travelers through their daily or weekly activity programme. It has since then evolved from a collection of stand-alone C++ programs to an integrated Java-based framework which is publicly hosted, open-source available, automatically regression tested. It is currently used by about 40 groups throughout the world. This book takes stock of the current status. The first part of the book gives an introduction to the most important concepts, with the intention of enabling a potential user to set up and run basic simulations. The second part of the book describes how the basic functionality can be extended, for example by adding schedule-based public transit, electric or autonomous cars, paratransit, or within-day replanning. For each extension, the text provides pointers to the additional documentation and to the code base. It is also discussed how people with appropriate Java programming skills can write their own extensions, and plug them into the MATSim core. The project has started from the basic idea that traffic is a consequence of human behavior, and thus humans and their behavior should be the starting point of all modelling, and with the intuition that when simulations with 100 million particles are possible in computational physics, then behavior-oriented simulations with 10 million travelers should be possible in travel behavior research. The initial implementations thus combined concepts from computational physics and complex adaptive systems with concepts from travel behavior research. The third part of the book looks at theoretical concepts that are able to describe important aspects of the simulation system; for example, under certain conditions the code becomes a Monte Carlo engine sampling from a discrete choice model. Another important aspect is the interpretation of the MATSim score as utility in the microeconomic sense, opening up a connection to benefit cost analysis. Finally, the book collects use cases as they have been undertaken with MATSim. All current users of MATSim were invited to submit their work, and many followed with sometimes crisp and short and sometimes longer contributions, always with pointers to additional references. We hope that the book will become an invitation to explore, to build and to extend agent-based modeling of travel behavior from the stable and well tested core of MATSim documented here.

Measuring Road Safety Using Surrogate Events provides researchers and practitioners with the tools they need to quickly and effectively measure traffic safety. As traditional crash-based safety analyses are being undermined by today’s growing use of intelligent vehicular and road safety technologies, crash surrogates--or near misses--can be more effectively used to measure the future risk of crashes. This book advances the idea of using these near-crash techniques to deliver quicker and more adequate measurements of safety. It explores the relationships between traffic conflicts and crashes using an extrapolation of observed events rather than post-crash data, which is significantly slower to obtain. Readers will find sound estimation methods based on rigorous scientific principles, offering compelling new tools to better equip researchers to understand road safety and its factors. Consolidates the latest updates/ideas from disparate places into a single resource Establishes a consistent use of key terms, definitions and concepts to help codify this emerging field Contains numerous application-oriented case studies throughout Includes learning aids, such as chapter objectives, a glossary, and links to data used in examples

This monograph provides an extended overview of modelling and control approaches for freeway traffic systems, moving from the early methods to the most recent scientific results and field implementations. The concepts of green traffic systems and smart mobility are addressed in the book, since a modern freeway traffic management system should be designed to be sustainable. Future perspectives on freeway traffic control are also analysed and discussed with reference to the most recent technological advancements The most widespread modelling and control techniques for freeway traffic systems are treated with mathematical rigour, but also discussed with reference to their performance assessment and to the expected impact of their practical usage in real traffic systems. In order to make the book accessible to readers of different backgrounds, some fundamental aspects of traffic theory as well as some basic control concepts, useful for better understanding the addressed topics, are provided in the book. This monograph can be used as a textbook for courses on transport engineering, traffic management and control. It is also addressed to experts working in traffic monitoring and control areas and to researchers, technicians and practitioners of both transportation and control engineering. The authors’ systematic vision of traffic modelling and control methods developed over decades makes the book a valuable survey resource for freeway traffic managers, freeway stakeholders and transportation public authorities with professional interests in freeway traffic systems. Advances in Industrial Control reports and encourages the transfer of technology in control engineering. The rapid development of control technology has an impact on all areas of the control discipline. The series offers an opportunity for researchers to present an extended exposition of new work in all aspects of industrial control.