Traffic Engineering and Intelligent Transport Systems

Gaetano Fusco

The realization of transport implies by its nature the movement of people or things. Depending on the technological systems used, the movement can take place using vehicles (i.e., excluding the pedestrian mode in the movement of people and the mode of transport by pipeline in the case of goods) and either linear or nodal transport infrastructures (for example, naval and air transport do not use linear infrastructures). The motion of the individual vehicle depends on the mechanical characteristics and its interactions with the road and with the external environment. The study of the laws that describe the motion of the isolated vehicle concern the mechanics of locomotion. However, while driving on the street, the vehicles condition each other. The modes of movement of a stream of vehicles depend on the physical and behavioral laws that determine its qualitative and quantitative characteristics: travel times, operating costs, level of service, level of safety, and impacts on the external environment. The discipline that studies them is called traffic flow theory.