Traffic flow
Overview
In Fluid Mechanics III, we will look at water travelling through pipes. How similar is this to cars going along roads? Models of traffic flow are essential for city planners and engineers, as they can tell us how to control traffic signals, how long to make motorway slip roads, and when to put in roundabouts instead of junctions.
We will see that there are many mathematical similarities between traffic modelling and fluid mechanics: conservation laws, shock waves, etc.
I am not an expert in traffic flow. My expertise is in fluid mechanics and mathematical biology; I just happen to like transport infrastructure. This will be a project where we learn together, read material weekly together, and then you will go ahead and model the systems you are interested in. This will be a great project if you have a lot of drive…
Co-requisites
You should be taking Fluid Mechanics III along with this project.
⚠️ This is an applied maths project and there will be computational work. You should be happy to spend a significant amount of time writing code in Python.
Pre-requisites
You will need an understanding of Newtonian mechanics.
How we might structure the the project
At the start, you could have something like:
- Conservation laws
- Traffic shock waves
- How we model safe driving
Reading list
- Ni, Traffic Flow Theory, Characteristics, Experimental Methods, and Numerical Techniques, 2016