scholarly journals A Market-Inspired Approach for Intersection Management in Urban Road Traffic Networks

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 621-659 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Vasirani ◽  
S. Ossowski

Traffic congestion in urban road networks is a costly problem that affects all major cities in developed countries. To tackle this problem, it is possible (i) to act on the supply side, increasing the number of roads or lanes in a network, (ii) to reduce the demand, restricting the access to urban areas at specific hours or to specific vehicles, or (iii) to improve the efficiency of the existing network, by means of a widespread use of so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In line with the recent advances in smart transportation management infrastructures, ITS has turned out to be a promising field of application for artificial intelligence techniques. In particular, multiagent systems seem to be the ideal candidates for the design and implementation of ITS. In fact, drivers can be naturally modelled as autonomous agents that interact with the transportation management infrastructure, thereby generating a large-scale, open, agent-based system. To regulate such a system and maintain a smooth and efficient flow of traffic, decentralised mechanisms for the management of the transportation infrastructure are needed. In this article we propose a distributed, market-inspired, mechanism for the management of a future urban road network, where intelligent autonomous vehicles, operated by software agents on behalf of their human owners, interact with the infrastructure in order to travel safely and efficiently through the road network. Building on the reservation-based intersection control model proposed by Dresner and Stone, we consider two different scenarios: one with a single intersection and one with a network of intersections. In the former, we analyse the performance of a novel policy based on combinatorial auctions for the allocation of reservations. In the latter, we analyse the impact that a traffic assignment strategy inspired by competitive markets has on the drivers' route choices. Finally we propose an adaptive management mechanism that integrates the auction-based traffic control policy with the competitive traffic assignment strategy.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
D Panatto ◽  
P Landa ◽  
D Amicizia ◽  
P L Lai ◽  
E Lecini ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Invasive disease due to Neisseria meningitidis (Nm) is a serious public health problem even in developed countries, owing to its high lethality rate (8-15%) and the invalidating sequelae suffered by many (up to 60%) survivors. As the microorganism is transmitted via the airborne route, the only available weapon in the fight against Nm invasive disease is vaccination. Our aim was to carry out an HTA to evaluate the costs and benefits of anti-meningococcal B (MenB) vaccination with Trumenba® in adolescents in Italy, while also considering the impact of this new vaccination strategy on organizational and ethics aspects. Methods A lifetime Markov model was developed. MenB vaccination with the two-dose schedule of Trumenba® in adolescents was compared with 'non-vaccination'. Two perspectives were considered: the National Health Service (NHS) and society. Three disease phases were defined: acute, post-acute and long-term. Epidemiological, economic and health utilities data were taken from Italian and international literature. The analysis was conducted by means of Microsoft Excel 2010®. Results Our study indicated that vaccinating adolescents (11th year of life) with Trumenba® was cost-effective with an ICER = € 7,912/QALY from the NHS perspective and € 7,758/QALY from the perspective of society. Vaccinating adolescents reduces the number of cases of disease due to meningococcus B in one of the periods of highest incidence of the disease, resulting in significant economic and health savings. Conclusions This is the first study to evaluate the overall impact of free MenB vaccination in adolescents both in Italy and in the international setting. Although cases of invasive disease due to meningococcus B are few, if the overall impact of the disease is adequately considered, it becomes clear that including anti-meningococcal B vaccination into the immunization program for adolescents is strongly recommended from the health and economic standpoints. Key messages Free, large-scale MenB vaccination is key to strengthening the global fight against invasive meningococcal disease. Anti-meningococcal B vaccination in adolescents is a cost-effective health opportunity.


Author(s):  
Sebastian Kummer ◽  
Marko Hribernik ◽  
David M. Herold ◽  
Jasmin Mikl ◽  
Mario Dobrovnik ◽  
...  

2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Bin Lu ◽  
Xiaoying Gan ◽  
Haiming Jin ◽  
Luoyi Fu ◽  
Xinbing Wang ◽  
...  

Urban traffic flow forecasting is a critical issue in intelligent transportation systems. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of urban road conditions, how to capture the dynamic spatiotemporal correlation and make accurate predictions is very challenging. In most of existing works, urban road network is often modeled as a fixed graph based on local proximity. However, such modeling is not sufficient to describe the dynamics of the road network and capture the global contextual information. In this paper, we consider constructing the road network as a dynamic weighted graph through attention mechanism. Furthermore, we propose to seek both spatial neighbors and semantic neighbors to make more connections between road nodes. We propose a novel Spatiotemporal Adaptive Gated Graph Convolution Network ( STAG-GCN ) to predict traffic conditions for several time steps ahead. STAG-GCN mainly consists of two major components: (1) multivariate self-attention Temporal Convolution Network ( TCN ) is utilized to capture local and long-range temporal dependencies across recent, daily-periodic and weekly-periodic observations; (2) mix-hop AG-GCN extracts selective spatial and semantic dependencies within multi-layer stacking through adaptive graph gating mechanism and mix-hop propagation mechanism. The output of different components are weighted fused to generate the final prediction results. Extensive experiments on two real-world large scale urban traffic dataset have verified the effectiveness, and the multi-step forecasting performance of our proposed models outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.


2003 ◽  
Vol 1836 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian L. Smith ◽  
William T. Scherer ◽  
James H. Conklin

Many states have implemented large-scale transportation management systems to improve mobility in urban areas. These systems are highly prone to missing and erroneous data, which results in drastically reduced data sets for analysis and real-time operations. Imputation is the practice of filling in missing data with estimated values. Currently, the transportation industry generally does not use imputation as a means for handling missing data. Other disciplines have recognized the importance of addressing missing data and, as a result, methods and software for imputing missing data are becoming widely available. The feasibility and applicability of imputing missing traffic data are addressed, and a preliminary analysis of several heuristic and statistical imputation techniques is performed. Preliminary results produced excellent performance in the case study and indicate that the statistical techniques are more accurate while maintaining the natural characteristics of the data.


Toxics ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Baptiste Languille ◽  
Valérie Gros ◽  
Bonnaire Nicolas ◽  
Cécile Honoré ◽  
Anne Kaufmann ◽  
...  

Portable sensors have emerged as a promising solution for personal exposure (PE) measurement. For the first time in Île-de-France, PE to black carbon (BC), particulate matter (PM), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) was quantified based on three field campaigns involving 37 volunteers from the general public wearing the sensors all day long for a week. This successful deployment demonstrated its ability to quantify PE on a large scale, in various environments (from dense urban to suburban, indoor and outdoor) and in all seasons. The impact of the visited environments was investigated. The proximity to road traffic (for BC and NO2), as well as cooking activities and tobacco smoke (for PM), made significant contributions to total exposure (up to 34%, 26%, and 44%, respectively), even though the time spent in these environments was short. Finally, even if ambient outdoor levels played a role in PE, the prominent impact of the different environments suggests that traditional ambient monitoring stations is not a proper surrogate for PE quantification.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Minzhi Chen ◽  
Fan Wu ◽  
Min Yin ◽  
Jiangang Xu

Planning of road networks is fundamental for public transportation. The impact of road network density on public transportation has been extensively studied, but few studies in this regard involved evaluation indicators for connectivity and layout of road networks. With 29 cities in China as the study cases, this paper quantifies the layout structure of the road network based on the network’s betweenness centralization and establishes a multivariate linear regression model to perform regression of the logarithm of the frequency of per capita public transportation on betweenness centralization. It is found in the present work that there is a significant correlation between the layout structure of an urban road network and the residents’ utilization degree of public transportation. A greater betweenness centralization of the urban road network, namely a more centralized road network, means a higher frequency of per capita public transportation of urban residents and a higher degree of the residents’ utilization of public transportation. In the development of public transportation, centralized and axial-shaped layout structures of road networks can be promoted to improve the utilization of public transportation.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 810 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Barragán-Escandón ◽  
Esteban Zalamea-León ◽  
Julio Terrados-Cepeda

Previous research has assessed the potential of solar energy against possible demand; however, the sustainability issues associated with the use of large-scale photovoltaic deployment in urban areas have not been jointly established. In this paper, the impact of photovoltaic energy in the total urban energy mix is estimated using a series of indicators that consider the economic, environmental and social dimensions. These indicators have been previously applied at the country level; the main contribution of this research is applying them at the urban level to the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Cuenca is close to the equatorial line and at a high altitude, enabling this area to reach the maximum self-supply index because of the high irradiation levels and reduced demand. The solar potential was estimated using a simple methodology that applies several indexes that were proven reliable in a local context considering this particular sun path. The results demonstrate that the solar potential can meet the electric power demand of this city, and only the indicator related to employment is positive and substantially affected. The indicators related to the price of energy, emissions and fossil fuel dependency do not change significantly, unless a fuel-to-electricity transport system conversions take place.


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