Transportation Engineering - Research Topics
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The Pavement engineering section focuses on research on rigid and flexible pavements for highways and airports, bituminous mixtures design, performance testing and modeling of asphalt concrete and rigid pavements, characterization of unbound materials, warm mix asphalt, additives, recycling, rehabilitation and application of green technologies in pavement maintenance. The laboratory facility includes all conventional asphalt binder and aggregate testing equipment in addition to dynamic shear rheometer, asphalt binder viscosity and aging devices, Marshall and Superpave gyratory compactors, thermal properties testing chamber, TSRST setup, and universal asphalt testing equipment.
The Traffic engineering section conducts multidisciplinary research on predominantly traffic safety (accident analysis, pedestrian safety, etc.), network traffic management (network optimization, traffic assignment, etc.), travel demand modelling (High Speed Rail, tourism, etc.) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications (studies on smart card data, Floating Car Data (FCD), and Bluetooth (BT)). The objective is to help graduate and undergraduate students to identify, analyze and solve complex traffic and travel problems. For this purpose, a multidisciplinary working group; Travel and Traffic Analysis Laboratory (TTAL), was established seeking collaboration with related fields such as city and regional planning, applied mechanics, traffic psychology, etc. TTAL group also collaborates with R&D companies at a project base. TTAL is also a part of METU-BILTIR Center, which has established the first ITS Research Group in 2014. TTAL group has a traffic monitoring room that includes a dynamic intersection control of the signalized intersection on campus, portable BT readers, magnatometers, as well as traffic and travel analysis software (PTV VISUM and VISSIM, etc.). For more information, TTAL web site can be visited at http://ttal.ce.metu.edu.tr