Preparation for the TRIPS project in 1996/97 consisted of two lectures provided by Roger Witte of the TRIPS team covering the role of TRIPS in transport modelling, its functionality and use. The coursework project and hence its design has the following objectives:
- to allow the students to gain experience in building a transport model,
- to allow the students to relate theory from the lectures to its use in practice,
- to impress upon the students the need to understand the functionality of the model and to attribute a level of confidence to the model's output,
- to allow the students to use the TRIPS model that is built to evaluate the effects of a proposed scheme, and
- to test the students' ability to document their work in a 'report to client'.
The first objective is based on the need for students to appreciate the attention to detail and time required to build a model through the preparation of input supply, demand and control files. Through building the model the students become familiar with how to use the manuals and in turn the requirements for assembling a linked series of TRIPS programs to obtain the necessary evaluation results.
The project consists of an 8 zone study (4 internal and 4 external zones) for which a strategic model is built to determine the traffic assignment for the morning peak period. Figure 2 shows the zoning system and road network. Objective 3 is satisfied through a requirement for the students to use TRIPS to determine the flows resulting from an all-or-nothing assignment and then to manually determine the all-or-nothing flows to identify whether TRIPS has indeed correctly performed the assignment. The proposed scheme
