Development of congestion maps for selected corridors of Dhaka city using instrumented vehicle

Abstract

The knowledge of travel times on road networks has vital importance to measure network performance and quantify congestion for road users as well as for network operators. Congestion of an urban road network varies in different times of a weekday and weekends. Time varying congestion heat maps are easily understood by all transport users. And time varying contour maps are effective way to estimate the network performance at various times by transportation planners. In this study variation of travel time on a selected road network of Dhaka city is estimated by developing congestion heat maps and contour maps by using MATLABprogramming software. And also shortest possible route for a certain Origin - Destination pair has been tested by using shortest path algorithm. Average Intersection delay is estimated for both week days and weekend days in this study. In this study, travel time data collection technique has been selected, the data collection by GPS-enabled devices such as, smart phone. GPS enabled vehicles provide an alternative to other travel time data collection methods with decent accuracy and can be used for providing real time traffic condition of the network. As Dhaka city has the high penetration of smart phone market so it is possible to extract a huge data set of travel time of a road network by this data collection method. The data processing and data analysis part is mainly done by the programming software- MATLAB which processes huge set of data in a short time integrating with visualization. Generated heat maps and contour maps shows a significant change in congestion from 1st slot (8.00.00AM- 11.59.59AM) to 2nd slot(12.00.00PM-3.59.59PM) , 3rd (4.00.00 PM-7.59.59PM) and 4th slot (8.00.00PM-10.59.59PM) on weekday. And for weekend maps shows congestion criteria is mostly haphazard pattern, though most of the congestion occurs on 2nd slot (12.00.00PM-3.59.59PM) and 4th slot (8.00.00PM-10.59.59PM) on weekend. The shortest path estimation for the O-D pair 48(23.742651, 90.395722, Ruposhi Bangla Mor) to 37(23.727629, 90.410457, Shohid Noor Hossain Square) is done by Dijkstra's Algorithm, which shows a shortest path for this pair varies in weekday but is almost same for weekend on this pair. As this study shows the route choice of the road users can vary in different time if the real time congestion maps are available. Thus this model developed in this thesis can be used in further study to develop a real time congestion analysis for the full network of any congested city in Bangladesh and construct route choice tools for the road users.