Model-based approach for estimating energy used by traffic flows on motorways with ITS

Monitoring traffic flows on road infrastructures has increasingly become a more common practice. Diverse types of sensors and devices to count and classify vehicles have been tested and installed on European roads in recent years, contributing to the growing availability of several databases. Moreover, methodologies to assess energy consumption for transport and the consequent emissions require several data sets, which are not always available. Consequently, it is an interesting endeavour to investigate an approach that can model energy dissipation, beginning from simple mechanical rules and traffic monitoring data and related parameters. The presence of ITS can have a positive influence on traffic flows. Beginning with this assumption, this study presents different scenarios based on actual and simulated data to estimate energy used in vehicular flow and how the energy consumed can change when the vehicular flow changes due to the influence of an ITS application. The approach presented in this study accounts to use both a mechanical model, providing a simple evaluation of energy consumption, and a traffic micro-simulation approach; both cases begin from the measurement of classical traffic flow parameters.