School Traffic Analysis

Challenge

The client, a school in Harare, Zimbabwe, was looking for a new location for school buildings. At one particular location, the concern was that dropping kids by car in the morning would cause chaos in the surrounding streets and problems with the neighborhood. The objective was to check through a simulation what the situation would really be and if it was possible to find a way for kids to be dropped without causing traffic problems.

Solution

To solve this problem, the road traffic library of AnyLogic was used to build the network of roads associated with the school.

There were three points of arrival to the school, and it was unknown where the cars would come from, so several scenarios with different car arrival distributions were built. To understand surrounding traffic, a person counted the cars at each point of interest from 6:30am to 8am. This data was fed into the model, making experimentation possible.

Outcome

The results clearly showed the chaos happening with traffic if students were allowed to come by car, and the initial suspicions from the school board were confirmed. Even though the idea of building the simulation was to try to prove that dropping students by car was feasible, the conclusion was that it was not. A simulation doesn't lie — sometimes it's not possible to bend the truth to make things work as we want.

Project Features

• Industry: Traffic
• Model: Road Traffic Library
• Duration: 2 weeks