Our Research

Many regions in Canada are adversely affected by harsh winter weather conditions, which can have a detrimental impact on the safety and mobility of motorists, and thus significantly hinder our nation’s economic growth and development. To mitigate the negative impacts of winter weather, our lab is working to address several important issues and challenges pertaining to winter transportation. Specifically, our research consists of the following four research components:

1) Traveller Behaviour under Inclement Winter Weather Conditions:

Adverse winter weather can significantly deteriorate the performance of a transportation system. For a highway system, which is of particular relevance to the theme of this research, winter weather could lead to lost capacity and increased congestion and delay as drivers must drive at reduced speed and increased car-following distance to minimise the risk of road accidents. Therefore, there is a great need to investigate travellers’ behavioural changes under inclement winter weather conditions, which would affect every aspect of their travel decisions. In particular, questions related to whether or not and when to make a trip, what mode to use, which route/highway to choose, how closely to follow other cars, and when to make lane changes will be the main concern of this research. Therefore, the primary objective of this research theme will be to develop quantitative understanding of how travellers respond to adverse winter weather and road conditions at both macroscopic and microscopic levels.

2) Estimation and Forecasting of Road Weather and Surface conditions:

One of the proven means for improving winter road maintenance and public travel is timely and accurate monitoring and reporting of road weather conditions. Real-time and near-future information on weather and road surface conditions enables maintenance operators to deliver the right deicing and anti-icing treatments at the right location and right time. It is also invaluable for the travelling public as it enables them to make informed decisions on when, where and in what mode to travel in the face of adverse weather events. Hence, an innovative framework to estimate key road weather and condition variables will be developed. When developing models, various state-of-the-art techniques such as remote sensing and GIS techniques will be implemented for effective data handling by incorporating, for instance, highway resolution satellite imagery to extract valuable information. With help of these extracted additional data, an advanced modelling technique, namely, geostatistical universal kriging will be used to improve the estimation and forecasting power of the variables under investigation.

3) Development of a comprehensive winter storm severity index:

This research component is to take a state-of-the-art approach to the problem, which considers small spatial and temporal units as the building block for evaluating the severity of the weather. The objective of this research is to create a set of winter severity indicators that are capable of capturing multiple perspectives, including material use, road safety, and mobility.

4) Transportation system optimization:

The main objective of this research component is to develop and refine models and algorithms for optimizing various transportation systems with a specific focus on one of the most important highway intelligent transportation system (ITS) infrastructures - road weather information system (RWIS). Incorporating the two other research components described herein as inputs to this research component, the focus will be on how to best leverage the benefits of neighbouring regions and provinces by considering the effects of their spatial demarcations when optimizing the system.