Ron Ayers

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING VARIABLE SPEED LIMIT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF AN INTERRUPTED FLOW

The urban traffic congestion is getting worse with ever increasing urban population and vehicle ownership. The long queues at intersections and blockage of traffic on urban arterial roads become routine during the peak hours. Interrupted traffic flow through signalised intersections and arterial roads have badly been affected by these occurrences. Thus this paper examines the possibility of employing variable speed limit (VSL) for upstream traffic during the peak period to improve the traffic performance through signalised intersections as well as in urban arterials. The micro simulation software VISSIM was used to examine a hypothetical road network under VSL application. An expected traffic flow near capacity condition was simulated several times to see the effectiveness. Results show that for a reasonable period of time, the VSL application to the upstream traffic improve the traffic performance at immediate downstream intersections in terms of vehicle delay (16%), average queue length (18%) and average number of stops per vehicles (16%), while intersections located far from the VSL application has no or little effect. Similarly, the arterial performances have also been improved for a short period of time on the immediate downstream link in terms of density (13%), space mean speed (10%) and traffic flow (2%), the effective is negligible on the links located far. In addition a slight improvement was noticed to the total journey time on the immediate link

Work in progress - a novel method of creating an academic content repository

This paper outlines a project aimed at addressing the issue of the scalability of online academic support. This project is being run during the Autumn semester at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) Toowoomba Australia, in conjunction with the Australian Digital Futures Institute. The study attached to the project will use Design-Based Research to evaluate the effectiveness of a simple, but innovative academic content and metadata creation tool referred to as Academic Assist. Academic Assist has been recently developed at USQ, as a plug-in block for the moodle-based Learning Management System employed at USQ for its several hundred online subjects. The pilot project extends over nine subjects, including three consecutive subjects in computer engineering; and covers faculties of Engineering, Education, Business, Science and Arts. Results of the study including acceptance surveys, expert reviews and usage statistics will be presented at FIE 2009.