Traffic Systems Modelling and Simulation

Many cities in India and across the world have witnessed alarming traffic growths in the past few decades leading to the most critical problem of congestion. Given the influence of road transportation on the nation’s development, especially in developing nations like India, the rise in congestion has propagated several detrimental effects such as low economic growth, inefficient mobility, high accident rates, and serious health and environmental related problems. It is for this very reason that traffic congestion has become the single most concern for road transportation planners and operators, and researchers of late. It is also now widely accepted in different transportation-related stakeholder circles that increasing roadway capacity is not a viable solution to the congestion problem, both from feasibility as well as economic standpoints. Thus, a better way to address the congestion problem is to improve the utilization of the existing systems through better traffic management and operations. It is also believed all across the world that operational management is the second-most effective strategy for containing congestion, only next to public transportation. To arrive at efficient operational and management solutions, the number of strategies that need to be tested may be large and moreover, field testing would be prohibitively expensive. Thus, microscopic traffic simulators which emulate the complex real-world traffic phenomena and provide a virtual testing platform have become the most sought after tools for design and evaluation of traffic operational strategies. Several microscopic traffic simulators (AIMSUN, PARAMICS, VISSIM, MITSIM, etc.) have been developed in the recent past among which, VISSIM is the most widely used one. This workshop aims at providing fundamentals of traffic simulation and hands-on training in VISSIM to the transportation professionals from academia and practitioners from various public and private sectors.