Scientific Award

PTV AG invited scientists from all over the world to submit their papers for the third PTV Vision Scientific Award. From the 18 entries the three best were rewarded; the jury which came from five countries scored submissions that were presented last year at scientific conferences. The first winner, Eileen Mandir presented her paper at the Users Group Meeting in New York City, Juliane Pillat at the Anwenderseminar in Dresden.

The 3rd place is awarded to Isaac Kumar Isukapati for his paper on hardware in the loop simulation with VISSIM. Isaac is a Civil Engineer and currently pursuing Ph.D. in Transportation Systems Engineering under the guidance of Dr. George F List.
His paper describes in detail the challenges, solutions and the application of hardware in the loop simulation. This is a complex undertaking with several potential pitfalls and the paper helps to avoid them. It is a very interesting use case for VISSIM and it relieves the user from re-implementing the complete controller for a PC.

The 2nd price is awarded to Sara Moridpour for her paper on the development and application of a lane changing model for heavy vehicles in VISSIM.
Sara is a lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Her Paper convinced because it defines a new algorithm to model lane changing behaviour of heavy vehicles, which is an important issue for traffic flow operations. The development of the method has been based on empirical data and the new algorithm has been implemented and applied in VISSIM.

The 1st price is awarded to Eileen Mandir and Juliane Pillat for their paper on choice set generation for macroscopic traffic assignment in large-scale networks for VISUM.
The method addresses the conflict between computational feasibility and quality of choice set generation algorithms on large-scale networks.
The main idea of the method is to use stated preference routes of 300 participants to calculate accepted detour factors, which are then included as boundary conditions for choice set generation using path enumeration.
The paper convinced because it provides a sound and well described methodological approach to solve an important task in the transport planning process. Furthermore, it describes the use of a valuable empirical data set and finally the method has been embedded in VISUM, i.e. it extends the software's functionality.