Assessment of impact of dynamic route guidance through variable message signs

Integration of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies with traffic surveillance has the potential of reducing the delays and costs incurred due to non-recurrent congestion through the dissemination of dynamic route guidance to drivers. Variable Message Signs (VMS), installed on freeways, are used for incident management and provide information about the incidents and diversion routes. VMS can prove to be a significant tool used by the Traffic Management Center (TMC) to improve the efficiency of the network by providing dynamic route guidance. Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) tools can be used to generate predictive guidance, and the TMC can disseminate it through VMS to the drivers. However, on-line evaluation of such systems is very costly and there is a need to simulate the real traffic conditions to evaluate the DTA tools before their implementation in the field. The current state of the art is to provide measured travel time information to drivers. The objective of this study will be to evaluate the network performance with the dissemination of predictive route guidance in case of severe incidents through the Variable Message Signs.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Rathi, Vaibhav

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Moshe E. Ben-Akiva.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39285

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39285