Solving Traffic Congestion with Industrial Mathematics

Posted on: 05/12/2019

The first challenge for KTN’s Industrial Maths/Geospatial SIG Study Group has been announced, and researchers are encouraged to apply to take part.

This is one of several problems that will be discussed at a three-day study group at the University of Bath from 21 – 23 January 2020.

 

If you are a researcher working in a UK university who would like to take part to tackle this challenge, please register free here.

 

Topography and its Effect on our Highways presented by Highways England.

Highways England is the government company charged with operating, maintaining and improving England’s motorways and major A roads, the Strategic Road Network (SRN). This challenge wishes to explore numerically efficient methods to integrate topographic features into two areas of interest for Highways England, deployable at scale.

 

  • Congestion (Average Speed) vs Topography:

We measure average speed across approximately 17,000 sections of road in order to understand how the SRN is performing continuously throughout the day. These sections of road have been mapped against a linear network model built of line features but does not account for topography of the terrain.

 

We would like to understand if any relationships exist between the average speed on network sections and identifiable topographic features and if possible if these can be modelled.

 

  • Weather versus Topography:¬†

This is similar to the above problem in that Highways England cannot predict how weather interacts with the network and particularly where aquaplaning and/or flooding could occur. It is felt that this might be a harder problem due to the lack of drainage data but novel approaches which might be used to signify risk areas is a real challenge which is currently of interest.

 

  • Resources available for challenge:
    Traffic data (1 month)
    Linear Network model
    Open source datasets can also be used for this challenge.

 

If you are a researcher working in a UK university who would like to take part to tackle this challenge, please register free here.

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