Real-time traffic monitoring and forecast through OPTIMA - Optimal Path Travel Information for Mobility Actions

OPTIMA is an innovative ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) platform for traf-fic monitoring and management, that provides off-line estimates and real-time fore-casts concerning the use (vehicle flows) and the performances (travel times) of the road networks. To this end, OPTIMA exploits an advanced methodology for modelling transport demand and vehicle congestion, through which the behaviour of drivers and the propagation of queues are explicitly represented. The connection to actual conditions is guarantied by field measures at discrete points (loop detectors, speed radars, video cameras, probe vehicles) that are collected in real-time and sent to a control room, where sophisticated algorithms allow to reconstruct the current and future traffic pattern on the entire network, hence extending the available data in time and space to achieve a useful information for driver navigation and transport optimization.