Special Issue "Highway Models and Sustainability"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 October 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. María Castro
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Transport Engineering, Urban and Regional Planning, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, 28040, Spain
Interests: road geometric design; road safety; highway modeling
Ms. Keila González-Gómez
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Transport Engineering, Urban and Regional Planning, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, 28040, Spain
Interests: road geometric design; vulnerable road users; road safety

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Currently, modeling techniques are key to assuring sustainability during the lifecycle of roads (from preliminary design to operation). The advantages of modeling pavements to get a better understanding of their materials’ behavior and the comparison of different design options in order to achieve more sustainable solutions are well known. Additionally, three-dimensional models of the roadway and roadside elements provide more realistic representations of the highway and its surroundings. These models could contain not only roadway geometry elements, but also important features related to the interaction between the route and the landscape, such as vegetation, side slopes, etc. Highway models help to create better designs, roads better integrated with their environment and better understood by drivers. All these enhancements can lead to a safety increase and a reduction of their environmental impact. The main objective of this Special Issue is to publish current advances in how highway models improve sustainability. From infrastructure depictions, to those improving mobility or safety, topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Finite element modeling for pavement structural design;
  • Traffic flow models;
  • Data collection, processing, and frameworks aimed at the modeling of existent road geometries and roadside elements (including vegetation, road safety elements, signals, etc.);
  • 3D modeling of road and roadside elements (aimed at sight distance estimations, design consistency studies, design and development of driving simulator scenarios, etc.);
  • Building information modeling (BIM) for roads;
  • Operating speed models for geometric design consistency;
  • Statistical modeling of crashes studies;
  • Modeling of intersections and roundabouts.

Prof. Dr. María Castro
Ms. Keila González-Gómez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Pavement structural design
  • 3D road modeling
  • LiDAR
  • Drones
  • Road element extractions
  • Traffic flow models
  • Speed models
  • Road geometric design consistency
  • Sight distance
  • Intersections and roundabouts

Published Papers (3 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

Article
Effects of Fog in a Brazilian Road Segment Analyzed by a Driving Simulator for Sustainable Transport: Drivers’ Visual Profile
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 9448; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169448 - 23 Aug 2021
Viewed by 310
Abstract
Visibility is a critical factor for drivers to perceive roadway information, and fog is an inclement weather condition that directly impacts their vision, since it reduces both overall contrast and visibility of the driving scene. Visual attention has been considered a contributing factor [...] Read more.
Visibility is a critical factor for drivers to perceive roadway information, and fog is an inclement weather condition that directly impacts their vision, since it reduces both overall contrast and visibility of the driving scene. Visual attention has been considered a contributing factor to traffic crashes, and fog-related accidents are prone to be more severe and involve multiple vehicles. The literature lacks studies on the influence of fog on drivers’ visual performance and environment’s infrastructure design. This article investigates the effects of fog on drivers’ performance in a Brazilian curved road segment through a driving simulator experiment – more precisely, whether the presence of fog (foggy scenario) or its absence (clear scenario) significantly affects the visual profile. In the foggy scenario, the results showed the tracked area was concentrated in a smaller region, despite an increase in the number of fixations compared with the clear scenario. The fixation duration did not change between the scenarios and the pupil dilation was shorter in the foggy one. The study shows the influence of environmental conditions on the driver’s performance and is one of the first on the use of driving simulators with realistic representations of the road infrastructure and its surrounding for the understanding of driving under fog in the Brazilian scenario. Besides roadway geometry elements, driving simulator studies enable analyses of features related to the interaction between route environment and driver’s answer, and can improve safety in places with visibility problems caused by fog, reducing their environmental impact and preserving drivers’ lives. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Highway Models and Sustainability)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Article
Dynamic Route Flow Estimation in Road Networks Using Data from Automatic Number of Plate Recognition Sensors
Sustainability 2021, 13(8), 4430; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13084430 - 15 Apr 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 518
Abstract
The traffic flow on road networks is dynamic in nature. Hence, a model for dynamic traffic flow estimation should be a very useful tool for administrations to make decisions aimed at better management of traffic. In fact, these decisions may in turn improve [...] Read more.
The traffic flow on road networks is dynamic in nature. Hence, a model for dynamic traffic flow estimation should be a very useful tool for administrations to make decisions aimed at better management of traffic. In fact, these decisions may in turn improve people’s quality of life and help to implement good sustainable policies to reduce the external transportation costs (congestion, accidents, travel time, etc.). Therefore, this paper deals with the problem of estimating dynamic traffic flows in road networks by proposing a model which is continuous in the time variable and that assumes the first-in-first-out (FIFO) hypothesis. In addition, the data used as model inputs come from Automatic Number of Plate Recognition (ANPR) sensors. This powerful data permits not only to directly reconstruct the route followed by each registered vehicle but also to evaluate its travel time, which in turn is also used for the flow estimation. In addition, the fundamental variable of the model is the route flow, which is a great advantage since the rest of the flows can be obtained using the conservation laws. A synthetic network is used to illustrate the proposed method, and then it is applied to the well-known Nguyen-Dupuis and Eastern Massachusetts networks to prove its usefulness and feasibility. The results on all the tested networks are very positive and the estimated flows reproduce the simulated real flows fairly well. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Highway Models and Sustainability)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Article
Development of Driving Simulation Scenarios Based on Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Road Safety Analysis
Sustainability 2021, 13(4), 2039; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13042039 - 14 Feb 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 988
Abstract
The analysis of road safety is critical in road design. Complying to guidelines is not enough to ensure the highest safety levels, so many of them encourage designers to virtually recreate and test their roads, benefitting from the evolution of driving simulators in [...] Read more.
The analysis of road safety is critical in road design. Complying to guidelines is not enough to ensure the highest safety levels, so many of them encourage designers to virtually recreate and test their roads, benefitting from the evolution of driving simulators in recent years. However, an accurate recreation of the road and its environment represents a real bottleneck in the process. A very important limitation lies in the diversity of input data, from different sources and requiring specific adaptations for every single simulator. This paper aims at showing a framework for recreating faster virtual scenarios by using an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)-based file. This methodology was compared to two other conventional methods for developing driving scenarios. The main outcome of this study has demonstrated that with a data exchange file in IFC format, virtual scenarios can be faster designed to carry out safety audits with driving simulators. As a result, the editing, programming, and processing times were substantially reduced using the proposed IFC exchange file format through a BIM (Building Information Modeling) model. This methodology facilitates cost-savings, execution, and optimization resources in road safety analysis. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Highway Models and Sustainability)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop