University of Twente Student Theses
Minimizing Freight Traffic Disturbances in Almelo: An analysis of conditional priority strategies and impacts
Cyrbja, G. (2023) Minimizing Freight Traffic Disturbances in Almelo: An analysis of conditional priority strategies and impacts.
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| Abstract: | by Geraldo ÇYRBJA The growing freight movement in urban areas can be considered one of the ma-jor traffic challenges in the near future. The increasing movement of freight causes traffic congestion, which affects the flow of both private and heavy-duty vehicles. Therefore, it is crucial to develop effective traffic management strategies in multi-modal corridors that carry a lot of freight traffic. The main issues for this category of traffic are the delays and the stops in the queues which are directly related to increased energy costs and carbon emissions. The main goal of this research is to de-velop freight traffic prioritization strategies that aim to decrease the travel time and number of stops of these heavy-duty vehicles across two intersections in an urban corridor in Almelo’s ring road. The research focuses on constructing prioritization algorithms for the traffic control system. The developed priority scenarios include absolute priority, priority with a recovery cycle, and conditional (platooning) strat-egy. The conditional priority makes use of synchronization between two consecutive intersections to start a green wave that prioritizes a convoy of trucks accumulated at the previous junction. Evaluating the proposed interventions using a simulation software provided very interesting results regarding the travel time and queue as stops performance indica-tors. The results showed that absolute priority is not beneficial for the whole traffic as it causes too many disruptions on the other directions of travel due to assigning most of the green time to the prioritized direction, even though it improves the flow of trucks significantly. The priority with a recovery cycle achieved the best perfor-mance among all the interventions during off-peak period (low demand scenario) by lowering the stops and the travel time in the prioritized direction substantially while causing little effect on the average travel time of the first junction and reduc-ing the average stops per vehicle of both intersections. The conditional (platooning) strategy resulted very beneficial during the peak period (high-demand scenario). It reduced the travel time of the trucks in the prioritized direction by 23 % in average while only causing a negligible increase on the travel time of the whole first intersec-tion. On the other hand, the average stops were reduced significantly for the priority route, as well as for both junctions in general. The results suggest that the condi-tional priority strategy is effective in decreasing the disturbances of freight traffic in urban intersections, but some implications are further discussed in the report. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | ET: Engineering Technology |
| Programme: | Civil Engineering BSc (56952) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/95525 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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