Summary:
Transport planning models have played a dominant role in strategic palnning since the mid seventies, and represent a world in themselves, almost disjoint from other transport and traffic modeling areas, namely those of the dynamic models accounting for dynamic behavior of flows and demands, addressing a sound way of dealing with operational policies. The advent of the Intelligent Transport Systems turned the ettention to dynamic models but at the same time raised questions concerning management policies that could only be properly answered by models able of dealin with lare netwoork and, at the same time, capture the essence of the dynamics of traffic phenomena. This fostered the research on Dynamic Traffic assignment and Dynamic Traffic Equilibrium as the appropriate technical frameworks which would support these modeling requeriments and simulation approaches describing the loading of vehicles onto the network to emulate the dynamics of flow propagation. The combination of the approaches gave birth to the mesoscopic traffic models. However, the needs raised by new applications as for example the so called Integrated Corridor Management have raised new modeling questions and great concerns on the best way of using the models to assist traffic managers in real-time decision proceses. Each question can be answered by an ad hoc modeling approach but conditioned requeriments on data and information exchange between the various models in a consistent and synchronous way. This lecture will provide an overview of the existing approaches, discuss some of the pros and cons, and illustrate them with examples of real life projects. And will discuss critically some of the requeriments for a full integration of traffic models and research questions still open.