Hello dear 3D Perspectives readers and bloggers,
This is a follow up on 3D City Management as promised in my previous post. In the last episode I explained how noise could be simulated and visualized in a 3D scene.
Today, I’d like to talk about another aspect of our everyday urban life. Traffic!
Most of us spend a lot of time in traffic and wonder how car flow could be optimized and made more fluid, saving us precious time. The old-fashioned way to create roads and traffic infrastructure is by building roads that connect point A to point B.
But if we want to create a city with a sustainable design and framework, we need to consider different elements before finalizing decisions: noise, air pollution, carbon footprint, energy consumption, etc. As a result, decisions about road infrastructure become more complex and need to be supported by simulation software that can optimize the combination of all these factors.
We are currently working with talented people at a French public research institute focused on traffic simulation: LICIT (ENTPE/INRETS) and LTE (INRETS) who have developed a dynamic traffic simulation application (SYMUBRUIT). The value of their approach is to be able to open their model to dynamic attributes like, speed, size of the streets and random events.
The outcome of these studies gives a much better understanding on the decisions that need to be made to optimize traffic and environmental impact.
For example the result of a recent study demonstrated that a roundabout reduced noise by 60 percent, fuel consumption by 80 percent, and the fluidity of the traffic was improved by 30 percent.
Now I’m not sure all of us believe that roundabouts are the best solutions everywhere!
We all need to be convinced. A realistic 3D simulation would help to better understand these studies. That is why, in cooperation with the CSTB (MoDev), the SYMABRUIT results can be rendered in a 3D scene with modifiable simulation attributes. It becomes much easier to understand.
See for yourself in the video below. Here you can see the impact of a traffic light being moved combined with a modification of the average number of cars per hour.
Once again we see that building and city management require powerful simulation capabilities combined with a powerful way to communicate the results to citizens. This is where the potential of 3D can be fully exploited. It’s also a direction we are exploring at Dassault Systèmes.
This post concludes this first series on 3D City Management. I hope you enjoyed it! Stay tuned, I’ll announce the next series soon.
See you soon!
Bruno
