Date of Award

1-1-2019

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Keywords

Civil Engineering, Connected Vehicle, Dynamic Traffic Assignment, Microsimulation, Transportation, VISSIM

Supervisor

Hanna Maoh

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

The land-border crossings between Canada and the United States facilitate over half of the goods transported between the two countries. Since trucks are the primary mode of transportation for the movement of these goods, studying the traffic flows and the characteristics of border crossings is of paramount importance for decision makers, planners and researchers. The province of Ontario is home to the busiest border crossings in Canada including the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario and the Blue Water Bridge in Sarnia, Ontario. GPS data collected from a large sample of trucks shows the route choice characteristics for these border crossings. The same dataset also shows the destination locations for these trucks. This thesis utilizes VISSIM, a microscopic traffic simulator, and its dynamic traffic assignment, an imbedded route choice model, to replicate these route choice conditions. Once the model is validated with the shares of flows from the observed (i.e., reference) datasets, the route choice behavior is analyzed under different delay conditions. The research also analyzed the effects of connected vehicle technology, at different penetration rates, on the efficiency of border crossing operations. As the connected vehicles increased in the traffic stream, it was observed that traffic was more streamlined and would switch to use the Blue Water Bridge during the simulation of an incident on Highway 401. The penetration rate was increased in 20% increments and with 100% penetration, 7% of total truck traffic had switched to Blue Water Bridge to travel to their U.S. destination.

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