2006 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

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Trinity College Dublin
Wai Yuen Szeto
The Centre for Transportation Research and Innovation for People

The Centre for Transportation Research and Innovation for People (TRIP) is a multidisciplinary research centre, funded by the PRTLI Programme of the Higher Education Authority, based in Trinity College Dublin with a link to University College Cork. TRIP is currently made up of 14 scientific committee members, 3 post-doctoral fellows and 13 PhD students from the areas of Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering, Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering, Computer Science, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Geography, Psychology, and Economics, and is headed by Prof Margaret O'Mahony. This centre is expected to continue to increase in size with the fast development of transport in Ireland.

The aim of TRIP is to develop and deliver cohesive and dynamic interdisciplinary activity on all aspects of transport research. Many projects have been undertaken in compliance with this aim. One example is "Methodologies for online adaptive traffic management and offline transport network planning", which involves more than one discipline, including: maths, computer science, geography, economics, and electrical, environmental and traffic engineering. The objectives are (1) to develop a methodology for transport network design over time, while explicitly incorporating the land use-transport-environment relationship, the spatial effects of queues, and uncertainties in transport demand and supply in the formulation, and (2) to improve SCATS by incorporating forecasting modules on traffic flow, travel time, and queue length, by adopting the data collection method based on the content-based video analysis technique as well as by encapsulating a traffic flow model considering spatial queues. This project includes a number of phases:

  1. Introducing an advanced project appraisal method considering spatial, temporal and environmental dimensions together with uncertainties in transport demand and supply.

  2. Collecting traffic data including traffic counts, travel time, emission levels, noise levels, driver behaviour etc., to validate models through GPS, video cameras, and loop detectors.

  3. Developing forecasting modules on travel demand, traffic flow, travel time, and queue length using the time series or neural network approaches.

  4. Developing software interfaces to link up several existing software packages for evaluation and optimization purposes.

  5. Developing efficient global optimization methods for the network improvement formulation and optimal traffic signal control model by parallel computing.

  6. Evaluating and analyzing proposed and existing adaptive traffic signal control and network improvement strategies through micro-simulation.

The principle investigator is Dr. Wai Yuen SZETO, Lecturer in Transport Engineering. His research interests are traffic signal control, transport network design and planning, land-use-transport-environment modeling, traffic flow modeling and forecasting, project evaluation, global optimization, intelligent transport systems, and dynamic traffic assignment. He has received five research paper awards from the international transportation societies.

Contact: Dr. Wai Yuen SZETO, BEng, MPhil, PhD, MHKSTS, MIEEE, MIEI, MIHT, CMILT
E-mail: [email protected]