Intelligent transportation systems and traffic management

Traffic congestion in urban road and freeway networks leads to a strong degradation of the network infrastructure and accordingly reduced throughput which can be countered via suitable control measures and strategies. After illustrating the main reasons for infrastructure deterioration due to traffic congestion, a comprehensive overview of proposed and implemented control strategies is provided for three areas: urban road networks, freeway networks and route guidance. Selected application results, obtained from either simulation studies or field implementations, are briefly outlined to illustrate the impact of various control actions and strategies. The lecture concludes with a brief discussion of future needs in this important technical area.

Markos Papageorgiou is a Professor and Director of the Dynamic Systems and Simulation Laboratory at the Technical University of Crete, Greece. He received the Diplom-Ingenieur and Doktor-Ingenieur (honors) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 1976 and 1981, respectively. In 1988-1994 he was a Professor of Automation at the Technical University of Munich. He is the author of the books Applications of Automatic Control Concepts to Traffic Flow Modeling and Control (Springer, 1983) and Optimierung (R. Oldenbourg, 1991; 1996) and the editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Traffic and Transportation Systems (Pergamon, 1991).