Course syllabus

Course-PM

ACE050 Transportation engineering and traffic analysis lp2 HT23 (7.5 hp)

Course Code	ACE 050
Course	Transportation Engineering & Traffic Analysis
Coordinating Unit	Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering
Term	Period 2, Autumn 2024
Level	Master
Location/s	The course rooms are SB-H3, SB-H6 and SB-H2 Details at Chalmers - ACE050, Vägutformning och trafikanalys
Duration and timetable	7 weeks and 7.5-hours in class activities per week The full timetable of all activities for this course can be accessed from the “syllabus” module of this course in Canvas

 

Course Description

This is a compulsory 7,5 credits course in Transportation Engineering. The course will cover basic and key knowledge for transportation engineering in terms of planning, traffic modelling, and management. More precisely, the course will contain following parts: transportation planning and its application, road geometric design, and traffic flow characteristics and modelling and . The overall aim is to introduce the students about the key steps and generally used methods for transport planning, modelling, design and analysis.

This course starts with teaching the classic transport planning procedures and relevant methods/models in each step of the procedure. Applying the knowledge to small cases via tutorials and homework will be taught to enhance understanding about the learned knowledge transport planning process. Then, the course will continue with roadway segment and intersection design for both rural and urban areas, where the students will learn about the specific geometric design elements and apply them to solve real world design problems. Finally, the course will dive into more detailed contents about traffic characteristics and theories geared towards learning about traffic operations, where the students will focus on traffic flow characteristics, fundamental diagram, level-of-services and capacity. While the majority of the course is highly focused on road transportation, other modes of transportation (e.g., Maritime) may be incorporated into this course.

The goal of the course is to give students the general overview of transportation engineering discipline, learn concepts of planning, operations, and design, and then proceed with concept implementation and problem solving. The students will learn about the most relevant challenges that transportation engineers face in modern society via invited lectures as well, and the contemporary tools that can be developed and used to overcome those challenges. Besides aforenoted course contents, several lectures about emerging solutions for transport engineering (e.g., automated and connected vehicles, and machine learning for transport engineering).

 

Course Objectives

After the completion of this course, the students should be able to:

1. Understand the concepts of transportation engineering that align with the main phases of every civil engineering project: planning, design, implementation, operations, and management.
2. Learn theoretical and computational methods applied to solve transport engineering problems:

• • • Know the detailed process of four-step transportation planning process,
    • Understand the models/methods in the four-step planning including trip generations, trip distributions, mode choice and traffic assignment
    • Know the fundamentals of road vehicle performance and human factors,
    • Familiar with the fundamental principles of traffic characteristics
    • Learn basics of traffic flow theory and fundamental diagram
    • Understand the road capacity and level-of-services
    • Know and understand road geometric design
    • Learn the fundamental principles in intersection and signal timing design

3. Acquire the information about the innovative transportation technologies such as automated vehicles and transport electrification.

4. Practice transportation engineering problems through active and engaging individual and team-based problem-solving, and connect the problem-based learning to real-world examples of transportation infrastructure projects.

5. Discover the potential career paths in the field of transportation engineering.

6. Enhance active learning and ability of solving transport-related problems.

 

Schedule

Time edit: Chalmers - ACE050, Vägutformning och trafikanalys

Course schedules and details: Course schedule for ACE050_2024_updated.pdf

 

Course literature

All required materials will be available in Canvas.

Copies of PowerPoint slides, recordings of lectures and related references for each part, will be made available to students in Canvas as well.

Transportation planning: Transportation Planning Handbook 4th Edition by ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers) (Author), Michael D. Meyer (Author)

https://silo.tips/download/the-four-step-model-uci-its-wp-michael-g-mcnally

Travel behavior modeling: Theory and Application to Travel Demand

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/discrete-choice-analysis

Geometric design: A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets 6th edition by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation 

Traffic flow and diagrams: Introduction to Traffic Flow Theory (victorknoop.eu)Links to an external site.

Capacity and level of service: Highway Capacity Manual (2010)

 

Course tasks and assessment

 The course will involve the following teaching and learning components: lectures; in-class exercise; tutorials and quizzes; homework; and examination. The schedule for the above contents will be available on Canvas. The assessment of the course is based on performances in these components. Homework assignments are individual tasks. Meanwhile, there are several in-class exercises (by individuals or groups) during the lectures. Tutorials are given to enhance and recall the learned knowledge on time. Exam is open-notes (no electronic devices), individual task, and it relies highly on in-class examples and exercises, tutorials as well as homework assignments.

The assessment of this course is based on the following four principles:

• Encourage active learning and reinforce learning.
• Robustly and fair evaluate student performance in the course.
• Fair and equitable for students to demonstrate what they have learned and their efforts.
• Maintain academic standards.

The detailed assessment criterion is summarized below.

Assessment Tasks	Weighting (%)	Individual/ Group	Due (week)
Homework and exercise	40	Individual	Available in the schedule file at Canvas
Final examination	55	Individual
Reflection report	5	Individual

 

Course Grading System for the Exam and the Whole Course

The perfect score is 100.

Final overall score	Grade in Ladok
0-60	Fail
60-75	3
75-90	4
90 or above	5

 

Teachers

Kun Gao, gkun@chalmers.se (Examiner and contact person)

Jiaming Wu, jiamingwu@chalmer.se 

Arsalan Najafi, arsalan.najafi@chalmers.se

Omkar Parishwad, omkarp@chalmers.se

 

Student representatives

Asem Alkawamleh, asemalkawamleh1994@gmail.com     

Jinat Tasnim Dristy, jinattasnim655@gmail.com

Raveena Nath, nathraveena00@gmail.com

Elmuiz Osman,   MUIZ_O@YAHOO.COM  

Arvid Sandberg, arvidsandberg99@gmail.com