Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) has commissioned Aimsun to build a transport model covering the 100-square-mile area within the M60 ring road.
The model is a strategic planning and operational management tool that TfGM can use to assess a range of schemes being developed in support of delivering its Bee Network vision - an integrated, accessible and affordable public transport and active travel system.
Digital mobility solutions provided Aimsun said its team has delivered the initial build inside ‘a very tight timeframe’, with final versions of the model to be delivered to TfGM later this year.
The key features of its new model are that it is 'multi-scale, supports transport appraisal, will be linked to continuous data sources, and will be built to a standard that can support real-time traffic management in the future'.
The system replaces the previous models in the city that were built in separate software packages and instead offers a new, fully integrated environment that includes macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic modelling levels in a single platform.
The strategic macroscopic level will be used for demand estimation, and nested inside, will be two dynamic layers: mesoscopic and microscopic.
The mesoscopic scale uses simplified vehicle dynamics for greater efficiency and is designed for fast, full model assignments, while the detailed microscopic model covers only Manchester city centre, where greater granularity is needed to capture interactions between individual vehicles.
Aimsun said that as a new feature for TfGM, the model will enable a link to continuous data sources, including SCOOT traffic flows (from the UTC system), Bus AVL data and Automatic Traffic Counters.
It added that its data processing will add ‘immense value’ because TfGM will gain historical data insights, not only from normal conditions but also from less typical time periods such as Christmas or Saturdays.
Aimsun UK managing director James Daniels said: ‘We’re building a model with a forward-looking architecture. We’re wrapping it in this infrastructure that is updateable, so it can be continually rebased.’
Sam Corns, highways strategy manager at TfGM, said: ‘We’ve tasked Aimsun with developing a large and complex model to ambitious project milestones. Given Aimsun’s experience in building similar projects elsewhere, and their status as developers of the software, we were confident they would deliver on this challenging project.
‘Crucially, Aimsun’s data services will enable semi-automatic model updates, which will greatly increase our efficiency while maintaining accuracy going forward.'
