Introduction


Urban Transportation Systems Engineering Lab


          It has been very well accepted by the government of India as well as various state and local governments that the overall development of the nation is not possible without good transportation infrastructure. In the last two decades many large infrastructure projects have been implemented (Mumbai-Pune express way, Konkan railway, Delhi Metro I, Bangalore Airport, Hyderabad Airport, Bandra-Worli sea link, etc), many projects are being implemented (Mumbai metro I, Delhi metro II, MIHAN-Nagpur, Golden Quadrilateral, etc), and many more are in planning stage (Navi Mumbai Airport, Mumbai metro II, etc). Apart from these nationally important projects a huge number of medium and small projects have been implemented or at various stages of implementation. Consequently the demand for well qualified transportation professionals has also increased drastically. Because of the good opportunities, a large number of students are opting to pursue higher studies in transportation engineering.


          “Urban Transportation Systems Planning” is a core course for a master’s degree in Transportation Engineering.  The contents of this course are similar to the courses offered with names “Transportation Planning”, “Transportation Modeling”, “Travel demand modeling”, etc. Implementation of the problems covered under this course is quite computationally intensive and are usually performed using commercial tools like TransCAD or Cube Voyager. These tools are very expensive and are not owned by most engineering colleges except by a few IITs. Physical distances and the lack of resources make us unable to perform experiments, especially when they involve sophisticated instruments. Also, good teachers are always a scarce resource. Web-based and video-based courses address the issue of teaching to some extent. Conducting joint experiments by two participating institutions and also sharing costly resources has always been a challenge. With the present day internet and computer technologies the above limitations can no more hamper students and researchers in enhancing their skills and knowledge. We propose to develop tools for performing various experiments usually covered in “Urban transportation systems planning” course using widely accessible platform such as C/C++. The students from various engineering colleges will be able to conduct the experiments on the web. Additionally they will be able to download the scripts for these experiments and can execute the scripts on their own computers.