This was a short research project (January to April 2016) funded by the Department for Transport’s T-TRIG initiative. The aim was to model urban road congestion as a collection of primitive events that are identified by sensors in the road network with the eventual aim of providing an early warning system for congestion.
Sensor data providing journey times on road link were provided by Transport for Greater Manchester. Congestion around the Etihad football stadium was used as a case study. The data were analysed using R, in particular the AGNES agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm, which produced dendrograms that showed the clusters of different types of congestion.