HERMES: a Tool for Mesoscopic Simulation of Advanced Traveller Information Systems

Abstract

Advanced Traveller Information Systems (ATIS) have seen a steady increase in popularity in the last decades among urban users. By providing travellers with relevant information, these systems have the ability to considerably improve traffic flow, but are limited by their penetration rate among the city’s population. In this work we put forward HERMES1, a tool to facilitate the evaluation of road networks through simulation with different ATIS and with different levels of information percolation among users. The usefulness of such a tool stems from the quantification of the extent to which an ATIS can improve total travel time and road utilisation by means of experimenting with simulation scenarios. This tool operates at a mesoscopic level, in which single users may be represented independently from each other, nonetheless are rather considered to operate at their macroscopic interactions with the network. We also illustrate example use cases for the tool on the motorway network between the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Porto.