Intelligent Transportation Systems and Toll Plazas

Paramics offers a number of features to integrate emerging ITS technologies into current models. With the increased requirement to add information and communications technology to transport infrastructures and vehicles, Paramics has implemented such features as car parking signage, Variable Speed Limits (VSL), High Occupancy Tolling(HOT), Vehicle Actuated (VA) signals and Incident Management to provide a more intelligent and dynamic network simulation.

Toll Plazas

Toll Plazas are easy to model in Paramics using combinations of lane/link based restrictions and user defined driver populations. Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) and manual “stop and pay” options can be intermixed in the same Toll Plaza to evaluate different combinations of facility. To ensure realism and accuracy of results the user has complete control of stop time distributions and drive through speed for ETC facilities.

Tolling Strategies

Modelling HOT scenarios is simple with Paramics. HOT works out of the box for effective use on existing freeway capacities including HOT lanes with complex dynamic demand driven requirements or simple time based schedules. Combined with comprehensive route choice modelling Paramics provides a powerful toolkit for assessing the cost/benefit assessment drivers make when choosing to use or avoid tolled road facilities.

The Network Audit Tool allows the user to quickly inspect network elements visually through colour coding

Toll Booth Lane Audit

The Hotspot Viewer Tool in use, monitoring queuing at a toll booth

Monitoring Toll Booth Queuing

Car Parking

Car parking signs ensure vehicles are aware of all the user defined parking options. As a car park becomes full, vehicles respond to the information and automatically route to an alternate resource. Paramics was utilised to model over 25,000 paved parking spaces and 1,500 unpaved spaces by Langan Engineering, when they modelled the traffic at the Giants Stadium in New York.

Variable Speed Limits (VSL)

With VSL the speed limit on a given link or route can be set dynamically depending on a host of user defined inputs such as speed, flow and occupancy. For example if the number of vehicles passing a point exceeds a set limit, then the speed limit can be reduced to a pre-defined value for any part of the network, to ease congestion and reduce the chance of an accident occuring.

VA Signals

Paramics has the functionality to simulate fixed time traffic signals and signals operating under Vehicle Actuation signal control (VA). VA control will allow user defined instructions to be carried out on the regular fixed time operation of traffic signals. Inputs to the VA signal logic are varied and flexible and may consist of traffic flows, loop detector occupancy, time of day, external settings etc.