Avaliação de alternativas para as interseções da Avenida Osório de Paiva com a Rua Raimundo Nery e com a Avenida Luiz Vieira utilizando microssimulação

Abstract

The agglomeration of people and their displacement needs has caused problems such as congestion and road insecurity that have become quite common in Brazilians cities, replicating the need for a better understanding about the issue involving the transportation of goods and people in the cities. The practice of traffic engineering has employed several tools to evaluate the current and hypothetical scenarios in transportation systems, among them the microscopic simulation that has been increasingly used by traffic analysts and researchers for dealing with internal processes. This study aims to evaluate and improve the traffic signal operation at the intersections of Osorio de Paiva Avenue and Raimundo Nery Street and Luiz Vieira Avenue using microscopic simulation. In order to achieve this objective, the operational problems of the study area were identified and characterized and finally the alternative solutions for operational improvement were evaluated. A data collection was performed in the study area in which traffic volumes, vehicle classification, saturation flow and control delay. The headway buffer parameter that influences the following distance was calibrated using the saturation flow collected as a target measure, reaching a percentage error of 0%. From the characterization of problems, was verified that four aproaches of the two intersections analyzed are with a poor operational quality indicated by the high levels of vehicular delay and queue length obtained in the simulation. Therefore, three scenarios were proposed for the improvement of the operation aiming at a decrease in vehicular delay. Statistical and practical significance tests were used, allowing to conclude that the scenario of the coordination optimization method using two-stage traffic programming had the most satisfactory results according to established criteria. The turning movements to the left were analyzed considering the travel time and the average speed in the scenarios, verifying that the turning movement to the left at the intersection of Raimundo Nery Street was significantly improved, while the turning movement to the left at the intersection of Luiz Vieira Avenue showed an increase of impedance that was considered unexpressive.