DEVELOPMENT OF SOFTWARE FOR TRIP DISTRIBUTION USING GRAVITY METHOD

Abstract

The main objective of transportation planning is to plan a transportation network for efficient, comfortable and safe traffic operations at minimal cost. A set of alternative transport plans are generated for the horizon year. The operating characteristics of each alternative in the horizon year are estimated in the form of flows in the network. The transportation planning process relies on travel-demand forecasting, which involves predicting the impacts that various transportation policies and programs will have on travel in urban areas. This report deals with the second phase of the travel-demand forecasting i.e. trip distribution. Various methods and techniques of trip distribution are available today, but almost all of them have some limitations in handling very large networks. The scenario of computer applications in the field of Civil Engineering has taken giant steps in the last decade or so, especially in relation to Computer Aided Design (CAD). The application of CAD has many advantages like providing user-friendly interface, increased accuracy, large storage and minimal computational time. Keeping the above aspects in view, generalized and user-friendly software for trip distribution has been developed using C++.