Centre of Excellence in Urban Transport, IIT Madras

Today in "The Hindu"...

A real-time guide to city commute System offers information on routes and traffic on 16-km stretch

About our Project (RTIS) in "The New Indian Express" (20.08.2014)

IIT-M Comes Up With Real Time Info System on South Chennai Traffic

For commuters passing through select routes in South Chennai, here is some good news. The IIT Madras has set up a Real-time Traffic Information System that could provide information including congestion levels, alternative routes, travel duration and incident alerts on the routes.

The information would be provided to users through Variable Message Signs (VMS) boards which have been installed at several points on the selected 16-km stretch of road and also through the RTIS website (http://rtis.iitm.ac.in/).

The 16-km stretch includes parts of OMR or Rajiv Gandhi IT Expressway, Taramani Road, Velachery Main Road, Velachery Bypass Road, Sardar Patel Road and Taluk Office Road.

“The website is already up. The VMS boards have been installed since last week along the selected stretch. The main thrust of the project is to provide an accurate source of information to commuters so that they can reach their destinations through the least congested route at any given point of time,” said a faculty member from the Transport Engineering Division of the Civil Department which is in charge of the system.

Users can select their origin, destination and mode of travel. The system will suggest routes for travel with the distance and estimated duration. The website also features colour-coded maps depicting speed and congestion levels on the various roads within the network, as well as traffic delays (in minutes) at various junctions and roads, live traffic images from video cameras monitoring the traffic, and an interactive map interface showing location alerts for traffic disruptions such as accidents, incidents, processions, and road work.

Over 100 GPS devices have been placed on city buses travelling the network route and 32 video cameras installed along the roads – both mid-block and at intersections. These use wireless communication to transfer information collected on the traffic conditions to the central control centre. This information is then converted into data that can be used by travellers, using travel time prediction models and algorithms.

This system is a part of the ‘Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) for Indian Cities’ project sponsored by Department of Electronic and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India. The prototype is jointly developed by Indian Institute of Technology Madras and C-DAC (Thiruvananthapuram).

Source - The New Indian Express
Photo: IIT-M Comes Up With Real Time Info System on South Chennai Traffic For commuters passing through select routes in South Chennai, here is some good news. The IIT Madras has set up a Real-time Traffic Information System that could provide information including congestion levels, alternative routes, travel duration and incident alerts on the routes. The information would be provided to users through Variable Message Signs (VMS) boards which have been installed at several points on the selected 16-km stretch of road and also through the RTIS website (http://rtis.iitm.ac.in). The 16-km stretch includes parts of OMR or Rajiv Gandhi IT Expressway, Taramani Road, Velachery Main Road, Velachery Bypass Road, Sardar Patel Road and Taluk Office Road. “The website is already up. The VMS boards have been installed since last week along the selected stretch. The main thrust of the project is to provide an accurate source of information to commuters so that they can reach their destinations through the least congested route at any given point of time,” said a faculty member from the Transport Engineering Division of the Civil Department which is in charge of the system. Users can select their origin, destination and mode of travel. The system will suggest routes for travel with the distance and estimated duration. The website also features colour-coded maps depicting speed and congestion levels on the various roads within the network, as well as traffic delays (in minutes) at various junctions and roads, live traffic images from video cameras monitoring the traffic, and an interactive map interface showing location alerts for traffic disruptions such as accidents, incidents, processions, and road work. Over 100 GPS devices have been placed on city buses travelling the network route and 32 video cameras installed along the roads – both mid-block and at intersections. These use wireless communication to transfer information collected on the traffic conditions to the central control centre. This information is then converted into data that can be used by travellers, using travel time prediction models and algorithms. This system is a part of the ‘Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) for Indian Cities’ project sponsored by Department of Electronic and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India. The prototype is jointly developed by Indian Institute of Technology Madras and C-DAC (Thiruvananthapuram). Source - The New Indian Express

Our project details (ATIS for Indian Cities) in The Hindu tamil paper...

http://tamil.thehindu.com/tamilnadu/article5999401.ece

போக்குவரத்து நெரிசல் தொடர்பான தகவல்களை பெற 6 இடங்களில் மின்னணு தகவல் பலகைகள்- ஒரு மாதத்த� சென்னையில் போக்குவரத்து நெரிசல் தொடர்பாக தவல்களை உடனுக்குடன் பெறுவதற்கு வசதியாக 6 இடங்களில் மின்னணு தகவல் பலகைகள் நிறுவப்பட்டுள்ளன.

http://tamil.thehindu.com/tamilnadu/article5480366.ece?homepage=true

சென்னை நகரில் போக்குவரத்து நெரிசலில் சிக்காமல் செல்வது எப்படி?- ஐஐடி புதிய திட்ட பணிகள் சென்னையின் தலையாயப் பிரச்சினைகளில் ஒன்றாக போக்குவரத்து நெரிசல் தொடர்ந்து வருகிறது.

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/iitm-lab-to-study-traffic-aid-navigation/article5485366.ece

IIT-M lab to study traffic, aid navigation The transportation engineering division of IIT-Madras is conducting research to provide real-time information on traffic to the public.

Wish u a Happy & Prosperous New Year for u & ur Family...

Wish u Happy & Prosperous New Year for u & ur family....

Dear All,

The Center of Excellence in Urban Transport is starting a new seminar series titled ITS Happening! The seminars will include regular talks by faculty, research scholars, and invited guests on topics related to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Transportation Systems Analysis, Urban Transport Planning and Infrastructure. While the talks will have a predominant transportation focus, we believe there is a significant inter-disciplinary component. We look forward to your participation in the seminars and enriching the discussions.

The talks will be held at the ITS lab - BSB 239. The first two talks will be by our alumni: Satya (Satyanarayana Muthuswamy BTCE 2000) and Lavanya (Lavanya Marla, BTCE 2004) this week (Sep 4, Tue and 6, Thu). Details are given below.

CoE UT Co-ordintators
http://coeut.iitm.ac.in/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ITS Happening! Seminar Series
BSB 239, ITS Lab

September 4, 2012 @ 4pm

Title: Traffic Engineering and Simulation
by Satyanarayana Muthuswamy
Presentation Abstract
This presentation is an overview of some interesting real world projects related to the use of simulation models for traffic engineering. The projects will cover topics such as planning for roadway closures during construction, analysis of operations at a market, emergency planning, and active traffic management. There will also be a discussion on some pitfalls and limitations of the models, and the need to exercise care when using these tools.
Presenter Bio
Satya is an alumnus of IIT-Madras. He graduated with his B.Tech in Civil Engineering in 2000. He went on to get his MS in Transportation Engineering from University of Minnesota in 2002. He has been a traffic engineer at KLD since 2002.
KLD is a traffic engineering firm based in Long Island, NY that been around for over 40 years, with its roots in traffic simulation. It specializes in applying models to traffic engineering.
He is currently a project manager at KLD overseeing a variety of projects. He has managed projects such as traffic impact studies, the development of tools for the analysis of MPT plans, and active traffic management systems. He has a strong background in application of simulation models. His experience includes analysis of traffic operations for many facilities including bridges, tunnels, arterial corridors, markets, and transit operations using both off-the shelf and customized simulation tools. He has also been involved in the development of evacuation time estimates for nuclear facilities. Among other things, he has provided training courses and guest lectures at NYU-Poly. He is a licensed professional engineer in the US.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
ITS Happening! Seminar Series
BSB 239, ITS Lab

September 6, 2012 @ 4pm

Title: An Efficient Simulation-based Approach to Resource Allocation and System Status Management for Emergency Medical Services in India
by Lavanya Marla
Abstract:
Emergency medical services (EMS) comprise an important component of public services, and involve allocation of scarce resources as critical events occur. The setting of this investigation is that of an Emergency Medical System operating in India, where the system operates under tight resource constraints. Additionally, the system is subject to inefficiencies such as patient abandonment and traffic congestion.
As a practical model for the organization, we first develop an efficient simulation-optimization approach to evaluating and optimizing ambulance fleet allocation and dynamic deployment. Central to our approach is the use of the call logs collected by the organization (or a probabilistic model of calls) in a data-driven simulator. Our simulator accurately determines the impact of ambulance deployments on the set of emergency requests, while accounting for complex interdependencies (e.g., from overlapping requests) and capturing implicit features such as time-dependent road congestion, which are not easily modeled using other techniques. Leveraging our simulator, we present a submodular optimization-based greedy approach for resource allocation. We derive data-driven performance guarantees which yield provably small optimality gaps in practical settings. We complement this with a Google Maps-based visualization, allowing the detection of demand clusters and easy comparison of the greedy efficient allocation with the organization’s current allocation. Our simulation experiments based on real usage data demonstrate significant improvement in the system's service levels using static allocations and dynamic redeployment policies discovered by our approach.
Bio:
Lavanya Marla is a Systems Scientist with the iLab’s Mobility Analytics group in the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University; and holds a PhD in Transportation Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She develops models and algorithms for large-scale transportation and logistics systems, using tools from optimization, statistics, simulation, simulation-optimization and other computational techniques. Her research interests include robust resource allocation for large-scale systems, decision-making under uncertainty, real-time dynamic re-planning, and multi-agent systems; with applications in aviation, logistics, emergency management and shared transportation systems. She is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, the Ann Hershfang scholarship awarded by the Women’s Transportation Seminar, and is a Co-PI on the recently awarded US Department of Transportation award for a University Transportation Center at CMU.

All are Welcome.....