Masters Theses

Date of Award

12-1996

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Civil Engineering

Major Professor

Lee D. Han

Committee Members

Fred Wegmann, Arun Chatterjee

Abstract

Traffic congestion continues to plague urban areas as a source of delay and concern for millions of road users. The congestion can occur as a result of a varied number of reasons among which the occurrence of an incident on the roadway is a major one.

Traffic incident detection and management is one of the most important considerations of traffic engineers. A prompt detection and mitigation of an incident helps in minimizing delay, congestion and other adverse effects. This thesis report presents a computer software called Visualization of Incidents using Simulation on Traffic Arterials (VISTA1.5), which is developed to facilitate the analysis of arterial incident situations.

VISTA1.5 is a microscopic simulation program of traffic with the occurrence of an incident, its detection and its effect on traffic characteristics. The software package is developed in Visual Basic with graphical interface, user-friendly pop-up windows and input/output. The simulation of an arterial incident is done with the help of output which consists of the flow rates, occupancy, vehicle-delays and time-space diagram. Users can change the signal control strategies in real time. The simulation is done each second and hence detailed information about any vehicle at any time can be provided.

In this report a detailed explanation of different design modules is presented. Also the capabilities and drawbacks of VISTA1.5 are reported. A case study is done and presented with a number of findings on traffic flow characteristics under incident situations as observed by VISTA1.5.

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