Assessing the sustainability performance of inter-urban intelligent transport

The implementation of ITS to increase the efficiency of saturated highways has become increasingly prevalent. It is a high level objective for many international governments and operators that highways should be managed in a way that is both sustainable i.e. environmental, social and economically sound and supportive of a Low-Carbon-Energy Future. Some clarity is therefore needed to understand how Intelligent Transport Systems perform within the constraints of that objective. This thesis describes the development of performance criteria that reflect the contributions of Information Communication Technology (ICT) emissions, vehicle emissions and the embedded carbon within the physical transport infrastructure that typically comprises three types of Intelligent Transport System. Active Traffic Management, Intelligent Speed Adaptation and the Automated Highway System are a collection of systems designed to transform the road network into a highly efficient and congestion free transport solution and all possess varying levels of uncertainty in terms of sustainability performance.
The performance criteria form part of a new framework methodology ‘EnvFUSION’ (Environmental Fusion for ITS) outlined here. An attributional LCA and c-LCA (consequential lifecycle assessment) are both undertaken which forms part of a data fusion process using data from various sources. The models forecast improvements for the three ITS technologies in-line with social acceptability, economic profitability and major carbon reduction scenarios up to 2050 on one of the UK's most congested highways. Analytical Hierarchy Process and Dempster-Shafer theory are used to weight criteria which form part of an Intelligent Transport Sustainability Index. Overall performance is then synthesized. Results indicate that there will be a substantial increase in socio-economic and emissions benefits, provided that the policies are in place and targets are reached which would otherwise delay their realisation. To conclude, an integrated strategic performance management framework is proposed which performs socio-technical comparisons of four key performance areas between ITS schemes in order to identify energy and emission hotspots.