EASING CONGESTION PROBLEMS

this article focuses on the Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic Signalling (MIDAS) system, how it provides road traffic data, and how this data can be used for traffic monitoring purposes. MIDAS includes detector loops that measure the speed and the number of vehicles, as well as provide one-minute averages of flows, speeds, occupancy and vehicle length data. The article discusses how MIDAS data along with probe vehicles and automatic license plate recognition data is used for evaluating traffic conditions. It also describes how routing information, which is available from mobile phone location data, can be fed into advisory systems in order to provide predictions of traffic flow on a network in advance.