A mesoscopic integrated urban traffic flow-emission model

Reference:
A. Jamshidnejad, I. Papamichail, M. Papageorgiou, and B. De Schutter, "A mesoscopic integrated urban traffic flow-emission model," Transportation Research Part C, vol. 75, pp. 45-83, Feb. 2017.

Abstract:
Due to the noticeable environmental and economical problems caused by traffic congestion and by the emissions produced by traffic, analysis and control of traffic is essential. One of the various traffic analysis approaches is the model-based approach, where a mathematical model of the traffic system is developed/used based on the governing physical rules of the system. In this paper, we propose a framework to interface and integrate macroscopic flow models and microscopic emission models. As a result, a new mesoscopic integrated flow-emission model is obtained that provides a balanced trade-off between high accuracy and low computation time. The proposed approach considers an aggregated behavior for different groups of vehicles (mesoscopic) instead of considering the behavior of individual vehicles (microscopic) or the entire group of vehicles (macroscopic). A case study is done to evaluate the proposed framework, considering the performance of the resulting mesoscopic integrated flow-emission model. The traffic simulation software SUMO combined with the microscopic emission model VT-micro is used as the comparison platform. The results of the case study prove that the proposed approach provides excellent results with high accuracy levels. In addition, the mesoscopic nature of the integrated flow-emission model guarantees a low CPU time, which makes the proposed framework suitable for real-time model-based applications.