Exercise: Traffic Management

Note about licences:

These exercises require a licence for Aimsun Small, Aimsun Standard, Aimsun
Professional for Microscopic Simulation, Aimsun Professional for Mesoscopic
Simulation, Aimsun Advanced or Aimsun Expert.

Traffic management exercises. Introduction.

In these exercises, we will see how to create policies to change the destination
of vehicles. We will define elements including strategies, policies and VMSs.
We will learn how to define Destination changes depending on traffic conditions,
and how the VMS message can be changed at specific times to reflect the
policy applied.

Exercise 1. Network incidents

Load the file ToStartWith_TrafficManagement.ang.
The aim of this exercise is to simulate the current traffic model with an incident
in the main avenue. The start of the simulation is at 8:00. There is an accident
at 8:10 that lasts for 30 minutes, the time it takes to remove the affected
vehicles. This accident blocks the two leftmost lanes in the avenue. See the
following figure for details:

Collision

The accident forces also a speed reduction to 20 km/h in the avenue.

To recreate this situation a strategy with one policy must be created. The policy
will contain two actions: an incident to represent the collision and a speed
change to reduce the speed to 20 km/h.
The first step is to create a Strategy, go to menu Project / New / Traffic
Management / Strategy and a new strategy will appear in the Project Window.
Rename it to Emergency.

Click on it with the right mouse button to create a New Policy and double-click
on the new policy to set the condition to Time and Time from 8:10, duration
0:30:

Rename it to Collision, click on the policy with the right mouse button, and
select New from the context menu and Section Incident.

Rename action to Section Incident. The picture shows how the hierarchy
should look:

Double-click on Section Incident and modify the dialog as described below and
as shown in the next picture:

Use the mouse to select the section colored in red in the picture. A rectangle
will appear at the beginning of the section that represents the incident. Move
and resize the rectangle to locate as shown in the previous figure. Accept the
changes in the editor.
Now, the action to reduce the speed to 20 km/h must be created. To do it, click
on the policy with the right mouse button, and select New from the context
menu. Select Speed Change.

Double-click on the action just created and define the parameters as shown in
the next image.

Now, the strategy must be activated in the simulation (double click on scenario
to access the dialog), under the Strategies & Conditions tab.

And we must also activate the policy in the simulation experiment (double click
on the experiment to access the dialog) under the Policies tab.

Once the strategy and the policy have been activated we can simulate the
replication. The situation we will get from 8:25 will look like the following figure:

Exercise 2. Emergency measures

Three different emergency measures are proposed. These measures will be
shown in the VMS to inform the drivers, will start taking place five minutes after
the collision and will last for 30 minutes. The following image represents the
three emergency measures to be taken:

NW

WU

Emergency measures description:

1. Rerouting vehicles out of the avenue: some vehicles will leave the
avenue through the next exit without caring about their destination. The
percentage of vehicles that will follow this recommendation (advised
trough a variable message sign) will be 40%
2. Rerouting vehicles through a parallel street: vehicles that want to take
the congested avenue but have a parallel non-congested street that can

take will be advised to do it. The percentage of vehicles that will follow
this recommendation will be 50%.
3. Assign an alternative Destination: Vehicles having centroid NW as
destination will have a new route assigned going to centroid WU as from
there they will be able to get to centroid NW. The percentage of vehicles
that will follow this recommendation will be 100%, so all vehicles will
change their route.
To evaluate any of these three actions we must create a new policy as the initial
time is different than the collision time. This new policy will be renamed as
warning.

The three actions explained previously will be created inside this policy as all
three will be activated at the same time and will last the same.
1. Force Turning A:
A Force Turning action must be added. To do it, please right-click over the
policy to open its context menu and select New.

The new action parameters are the following ones:

2. Force Turning B:
Another Force Turning action must be added. To do it, please right-click over
the policy to open its context menu and select New.

This change is more complex than the previous one because vehicles must be
redirected from a point located far away from the conflict and from the diversion
point itself. Through the section where the VMS is a lot of vehicles drive but not
all are aiming the avenue where the accident is, so the first thing that must be
indicated is that this redirection affects the vehicles going through a specific
section only. This can be set in the Section in Path parameter.

Next image shows that the redirection must affect only vehicles willing to go
through section in red, with id = 133.

Furthermore, the redirection must indicate not only next section but a set of
sections that contains the lateral street in order to avoid the avenue where the
accident is.

An O/D Route that starts in the first section of the redirection and ends where
vehicles stop being redirected must be defined. To do it, right-click on
Infrastructure to open its context menu and select New Subpath. Rename it to
Lateral Route.

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The O/D Route must be defined like this:

The policy should have the following parameters:

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3. Destination Change:
Lastly, a Destination Change action must be applied on vehicles going
under VMS 3 and having original centroid NW as destination. Their destination
will be changed and they will be redirected to centroid WU. A Destination
Change action must be created. We will rename it to Destination Change:

Its parameters will be:

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In order to be able to simulate the new actions associated to the Warning

policy, the policy must be activated in the experiment:

During the simulation we will observe the following situation:

We observe that the incident in the main avenue does not affect the traffic
there as much as expected due to the new re-routings produced in the network.
They mainly affect the lateral lane that gets a high amount of vehicles coming
from the re-routings.

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Exercise 3. New control plan

In the last simulation run we can observe that the traffic light in the lateral lane
is keeping a huge amount of the vehicles that have been rerouted. Obviously,
the current control plan was created to deal with a lower flow of vehicles. This
exercise proposes a change in the control plan related to the Warning policy.
Current control:

New Control: The movement from South to North gets prioritized.

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The first step is to create a new control plan as shown in the previous image. It
will be renamed as Control Plan Emergency.
The next step is to create a new Control Plan Change action in the Warning
policy.

Then, the new control plan must be selected in the action:

If we simulate with this new action taken into account, the situation improves:

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Exercise 4. Triggers
Triggers are used to activate policies automatically depending on several
conditions. In this exercise, lets suppose we have a detector in the main
avenue just before the conflict zone that is gathering occupancy. What we will
do is to activate an action once the occupancy detected is over 80% and we will
keep the action activated until the occupancy decreases below 50%. The action
to be activated will be like the Force Turning A in exercise 2 but with an 80% of
evacuation.
The first thing to do is to locate the detector in the network as shown in the
following figure:

Afterwards, we will define in the scenario to gather detection data every 2

minutes. This is done in the Output folder in the scenario editor.

The next step is to create the activation trigger and the deactivation one. To
create a trigger, the option New / Traffic Management / Trigger must be
selected.

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The trigger will be renamed as Trigger High Occupancy. Its editor, by double
clicking on it, will be open to fill the parameters as shown in the next image.
Once the editor is open, the first thing that needs to be done is to click on New
Condition and then the parameters can be filled in.

The deactivation trigger can be created following the same steps. The trigger
name will be Trigger Med Occupancy:

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Once the activation and deactivation triggers have been created a new policy
called Automatic Warning must be created and the triggers must be assigned
to it as shown in the following image:

A Force Turning action for this new policy must be created. It will be exactly like
Force Turning A in exercise 2 except for its Compliance Level Percentage,
containing 80% instead of 40%.

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Lastly, in the experiment the Automatic Warning and Collision policies must
be selected before starting a simulation.

If the Occupancy Time Series in the detector is observed, the following graph
will be shown, where the red circles indicate when the policy has been activated
meanwhile the green ones indicate when the policy has been deactivated:

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Exercise 5. Turn Closure.

Adding to the strategy of the previous Warning exercises, we have a new
policy action called Turn Closure.

These are the parameters that have to be filled in:

When we simulate with the Warnings policy enabled.

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Exercise 6. Periodic Incidents

This exercise shows you how to create a traffic condition that simulates the
parking in two lanes of the vehicles of one section. In order to do this, it is best
to use incidents. It is possible to create multiple incidents that are randomly
positioned within a specific area.

We are going to simulate the network using periodic incidents on the fast lane of
the section marked in red. The following dialogue demonstrates the parameters
that are going to be used:

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If we add the traffic condition to the scenario, we can see the following result:

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