Team Number: 25
School Name: Bosque School
Area of Science: Modeling
Project Title: Transportation Modeling
Problem Definition:
Urban traffic is constantly slow and congested in large city as cars crawl along caring one person to a nearby destination. This massive amount of cars creates high pollution levels in cities and creates numerous hassles in navigating around a city. The constant need for maintenance of roads drains public fiscal resources. Also, the car is an uneconomical, high maintenance machine that is damaging the environment through pollution and waste.
Problem Solution:
The speed of public transportation has been increasing exponentially recently. Public transportation now appears as a feasible replacement to the automobile, allowing people to navigate around a city quickly.
Progress to Date:
We have spent the time since Glorieta researching the complex subjects of traffic management, traffic simulation, transit simulation, and similar programs that have modeled people, public transportation, as well as vehicular traffic. Through this research, we have found that we need to make a few concessions when it comes time to finally write our program. For example, we found that the modeling of traffic signals themselves is extremely complex; we thus decided that the traffic signals in our model will have a certain ratio red lights and a certain ratio of green lights. The light change ratio will be based on auto-decincrementation of numeral values assigned to the traffic signals, defined within the project field, based on traffic ratio and time of day/transit.
We have also begun the preliminary steps in programming the final program. We have looked at code from some other projects similar to ours, and we will utilize some of this to our advantage. We have learned how complex traffic modeling is and thus will utilize pre-written code in some parts of the program in order to save time and complete the project within the time constraints we have.
Expected Results:
When the program is complete, it will be a C++ driven program, based on numerous classes defined to improve the model as well as sections of the world. The program will have three parts. The first part will be a GUI programmed in Java or Visual Basic .NET, used to generator "world files" which define the world in which the simulation will run. The second part of the program will be written purely in C++, which will interpret the world file and use it to run the simulation of the world. This will expedite the process, allowing for the model to run faster. The final part of the program is another graphical interface, based in DirectX 3D or another 3D engine, which will provide a full-scale, which can be navigated world, providing a graphical output of the program.
Team Members
Sponsoring Teacher(s)
Project Mentor(s)