Energy consumption of a traffic flow: a model-based application for estimating the effects of ITS on motorways

Monitoring of traffic flows on road infrastructures is an increasingly common practice: different type of sensors and devices for counting and classifying vehicles have been tested and installed on the European roads in the last years, contributing to the growing of the availability of several databases. On the other hand, methodologies for the assessment, in transport field, of the energy consumption and the consequent emissions require several data sets, that are not always available. Consequently, it is interesting to investigate an innovative approach able to represent the energy dissipation, starting from traffic monitoring, with related parameters. The presence of ITS may, as well-known, influence a traffic flow. Therefore different scenarios based on actual or simulated data allow us to estimate the energy use of a vehicle flow, also when influenced by an ITS application. As concerns the approach presented in this paper, it takes into account both a mechanical model, which provides an easy evaluation of energy consumption, and a traffic microsimulation approach, starting in both cases from the measurement of the classical traffic flow parameters.