ADVANCED JOURNEY PLANNING SERVICES FACILITATED BY THE TRAVEL INFORMATION HIGHWAY

Up-to date travel information assists travellers to make more informed decisions about when, where and how to travel, and enables more optimum use of the available transport infrastructure. The Travel Information Highway (TIH) approach is intended to enable transport operators, traffic network operators and independent service providers to exchange travel information so that a standardised interface can be used to provide all the information. Currently, real-time information is available from the Highways Agency, Mattisse (traffic and public transport in the Midlands area), Northern France, and the South Wales M4 corridor. Transport for London and the Reading UTMC Project will be added to the system in the near future. TRL has developed a number of demonstration VASP (Value Added Service Provider) services using the data currently available from the Highways Agency. These services include the Journey Time Assistant, a web-based application giving strategic route advice to motorists. This is based on a CONTRAM model of all the English motorways and major A-roads. The model comprises 1736 links representing motorway and A-road links. 48 time-slices model half-hour periods throughout each day. Output statistics available include flow, speed, density, time, queue and delay on each link for each time slice. A shortest route finding algorithm has been developed based on the change in link speeds throughout the day. The route can be optimised for journey distance or journey time. Future developments are discussed.