Transportation Engineering
Abstract
Abstract Transportation engineering is a multidisciplinary subject within civil engineering involving the planning, design, operation, and maintenance of transportation systems and associated infrastructure such as highways, roads, and railways. In this chapter, the basic concepts of queuing theoryare introduced, focusing on two basic queuing theory models, D/D/1 (deterministic models) and M/M/1 (random or memoryless models). The applications of queuing theory models in transportation engineering are illustrated through two synthetic traffic queue problems. Additionally, the optimization of a transport network is discussed in which two typical optimization methods, linear programming and dynamic programming, are illustrated. The product shipping and shortest route problems are used to demonstrate applications of these methods in transport network optimization. Finally, a typical deep learning method, long short-term memory, is introduced and its application in transportation engineering is demonstrated through a traffic flow prediction problem for the M25 motorway in London. The results underscore its effectiveness, achieving an R2 accuracy of 0.96 in testing. We have included MATLAB code for all the examples discussed in this chapter to facilitate the reader’s learning and implementation of the methods and concepts.