AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING THE IMPACT OFADVANCED TRAVELER INFORMATION SYSTEMS ON TRAFFICPERFORMANCE

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze the effect Advanced TravelerInformation Systems (ATIS) may have on traffic, by assessing, at the same time, the impactof ATIS in drivers’ decisions. ATIS are an effective way to inform drivers to make routechoices and avoid traffic congestion. It is obvious that both the way traffic affects road usersbehavior or reaction, as concerns mode or route change, and ATIS influences driver behavior,and the way drivers adopt the information provided by ATIS, are important issues inattempting to understand and predict driver behavior. Such understanding is usually based onthe development of models that capture and analyze user behavior in the presence ofinformation, varying in type, mode, and content. A platform is developed to collect andprocess data, which lead to the development of driver behavior models, assessing the impactsof alternative information systems. Furthermore, the structure of the driver behavior models isdefined, and traffic simulation is used to quantify the impact of the alternative ATIS ontraffic.The main observation is that regardless of the model, provision of information (any ATISscenario) affects the delays of the network, varying from 4.5% to 30% as compared to the NOATIS scenario. The lower impact is observed in the evening peak in all scenarios, ascompared to the morning peak for the same scenario, with a difference between the two timeperiods from approximately 1% to 10%. This indicates that ATIS affects more drivers whilegoing rather than returning from work, as the value of time is perceived differently.