Project Outline
City Science was awarded a Department for Transport Innovation Grant (T-TRIG) to utilise their modelling expertise to develop a toolkit that enables Local Authorities to identify, quantify and predict network resilience issues within transport networks.
City Science Response
Using the team’s transport data and analytics expertise, City Science developed a toolkit to answer the key burning questions:
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How often and how badly are specific road segments affected in the network?
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What routes are most problematic and how bad does it often get?
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What is the impact of an incident? How should we prepare a re-routing strategy?
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Which resilience improvements should we prioritise from a range of policy objectives?
Using TrafficMaster speed data captured every 15 minutes over the course of 3 years City Science developed statistical metrics to answer these key questions. Using these metrics - the “Link Event”, the "347 Day Event" (looking at the worst 5% of cases) and the “Volatility of Congestion” – cities can build up a comprehensive picture of their network and the key resilience issues. In particular, the toolkit allows cities to visualise and prioritise key resilience issues between Areas of Economic Importance (AEIs) with the goal of improving connectivity and productivity.
To utilise the large geospatial and temporal dataset, City Science developed network pruning and robust interpolation processes to seamlessly manage the data. Analyses were developed in Python and outputs communicated through a series of geospatial and graphical visualisations.