Canal Traffic Simulation – City of Venice

Situation

Photo Credit: Kyle H. Miller

The City of Venice needed to revamp operations on its canal system to reduce traffic noise and minimize the serious architectural damage to the city’s structures caused by wakes in the canal system. As part of the CIVITAS Initiative, a project sponsored by the European Union, the investigators wanted to identify solutions that would lead to more sustainable, clean, and energy-efficient urban transport.

Solution

The Santa Fe Complex team, as part of the MOBILIS project in Venice led by Fabio Carrera and Stephen Guerin, created a simulation of waterborne traffic based on turn data collected by human observers at twenty-three observation points in the Venice canal system.

The data for each boat’s turning included the time-of-day, the canal it emerged from, the canal it entered, and the boat’s license number.

Agent models of boat pilot behavior derived from the data allowed traffic flow to be simulated, subject to the constraints of total canal volume and one-way traffic regulations on certain canals.

The resulting model, called the Venice Table, allowed multiple stakeholders—including city administration, taxi drivers, cargo operators, and citizens—to plan canal regulations to minimize traffic noise and reduce moto ondoso, the wakes responsible for major damage to the city’s architecture.

Users of the model could determine efficient traffic patterns for taxi and cargo operators. Multiple users could explore various options by interacting simultaneously with the simulation using physical objects like laser pointers and whiteboard magnets to load and sort GIS data.

The Venice Table project uses machine vision that pairs a camera and a projector, a technology leveraged in other Complex projects such as Simtable and Ambient Pixel.

Team Leads: Fabio Carrera, Stephen Guerin