Course Overview

Transport system is the backbone of the national and local economy. An inefficient transport system has detrimental social, economic, and environmental impacts. The fast pace of growth of vehicle ownership, as well as the rapid urbanization experienced in many parts of India, has caused significant deterioration in the mobility of people and goods. A recent worldwide ranking of traffic congestion by TomTom has listed Mumbai as the most congested city in the world, with New Delhi at the fourth position. Research has projected traffic congestion costs for New Delhi alone to be around 14658 million US$/yr for the year 2030. These figures are 10-15% of the country's GDP- which is far higher than any developed nation where the cost of congestion is around 1-2% of the country's GDP.

Indian Government has taken serious initiatives for ‘Smart Cities’ for which ‘Smart Mobility’ is vital. Moreover, with the advancement of technology and India’s initiative towards digital India, new sources of traffic and mobility data for Indian conditions are increasingly becoming available, and it is projected to accelerate in the near future. The need of the hour is to think outside the box and support the long overdue Smart Mobility mobility powered by an efficient, effective, and productive integrated multimodal transport system. Future transport and mobility jobs need experts with strong theoretical foundations backed with insights on real-world applications and a deep understanding of advanced modelling and analytics tools. This course addresses this need by leveraging advancements in network optimization using advanced data analytics and modelling case studies from overseas, with the discussions tailored to Indian challenges and applications. Moreover, this course will also aim to discuss the research and development needs for Indian traffic conditions.

Traffic monitoring, management, and control have a long international academic history and practical success stories. Unfortunately, it is overlooked in the majority of Indian cities outside the larger metro area. Although many Indian universities lately produce graduates who are well-versed in transport planning and basic traffic analysis, there is a significant shortage of skills needed for advanced traffic management and control. Thus, it is timely that policy-makers, professionals, academics, and students of transport systems are exposed to the fundamentals of transport network optimization and control within a more information-rich environment that is increasingly available now.

This course can be useful to the students and faculty of transportation engineering from different academic institutions across India. Professionals from many government organizations, specifically in the Northeast region of India, will be able to attend the course in person at Guwahati. Police department personnel who may have jurisdiction over traffic control in many municipalities will also have an interest in learning the advances taught in this course. In addition, new entrepreneurs with technical backgrounds in electrical, computer and mechanical technology, but without a transportation science background who may have plans for developing smartphone-based applications, as well as professionals in the traffic control instrumentation industries from around India will also benefit from this course.

Objectives

Specifically, the objectives are to meet the following learning outcomes, where on successful completion of the course, participants should be able to:

1. Understand the fundamental tools and techniques needed for monitoring, management and control of complex multimodal transport systems;
2. Understand the basic science of multimodal traffic flow, both for homogeneous and mixed flow;
3. Understand the data-driven network optimization and decision support for large urban networks; and
4. Identify research needs with a focus on the Indian transport system

You Should Attend, If, you are

• Executives, engineers and researchers from manufacturing, service and government organizations including R&D laboratories.
• Students at all levels (BTech/MTech/PhD) or Faculty from reputed academic institutions and technical institutions.