An assessment of VMS-rerouting and traffic signal planning with emission objectives in an urban network — A case study for the city of Graz

Abstract

This paper discusses a case study evaluating the potential impact of ITS traffic management on CO 2 and Black carbon tailpipe emissions. Results are based on extensive microsimulations performed using a calibrated VISSIM model in combination with the AIRE model for calculating the tailpipe emissions from simulated vehicle trajectories. The ITS traffic management options hereby consist of easily implementable actions such as the usage of a variable message sign (VMS) or the setting of fixed time signal plans. Our simulations show that in the current case shifting 5% of vehicles from one route to another one leads to an improvement in terms of emissions only if the VMS is complemented with an adaptation of the signal programs, while the VMS sign or the change of the signal plans alone do not yield benefits. This shows that it is not sufficient to evaluate single actions in a ceteris paribus analysis, but their joint network effects need to be taken into account.

Examination of the Effects of Dynamic Speed Limit on Shock Waves with a Simulation Technique

“…We anticipate that speed limitation as a tool would help to optimise the use of the infrastructure and the dynamically varying speed limitation would produce better results than the simple static case. The variable message signs (VMS) can effectively influence driver behaviour (Ghosh et al, 2018;Yan and Wu, 2014) therefore VMS could have an effect on traffic safety (Lee and Cho, 2015;Yu and Abdel-Aty, 2014) or on emission in urban area (Kölbl et al, 2015). Thus, complexity of the transportation system (infrastructure, driving behaviour, IT solutions, communication) demonstrating the importance of the interrelation between the built environment, information flow and traffic, which is the basis of the Built Environment Information Platform (BENIP) idea (Horváth et al, 2023).…”