Engineers responsible for road traffic engineering should consider the use of industrial mathematics so solve complex problems, particularly where conventional software programs are not available or do not work.
At the Australian Centre for Commercial Mathematics (ACCM) we recently worked with the NSW roads and Traffic Authority, now Road and Maritime Services (RMS), to develop a statistical framework to guide traffic simulation studies. Due to the huge expense of designing and building new road infrastructure or testing alternative traffic scenarios, all design changes are first assessed in micro-simulation, the simulation of individual vehicles in a traffic system. In collaboration with RMS, ACCM identified a need for rigorous statistical analysis of the outputs of micro-simulation. The main objective was to increase confidence in the results of simulation models.