Traffic engineering (transportation) in the context of "Traffic flow"

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. A queueing model is constructed so that queue lengths and waiting time can be predicted. Queueing theory is generally considered a branch of operations research because the results are often used when making business decisions about the resources needed to provide a service.

Queueing theory has its origins in research by Agner Krarup Erlang, who created models to describe the system of incoming calls at the Copenhagen Telephone Exchange Company. These ideas were seminal to the field of teletraffic engineering and have since seen applications in telecommunications, traffic engineering, computing, project management, and particularly industrial engineering, where they are applied in the design of factories, shops, offices, and hospitals.

Traffic calming uses physical design, signs, painted markings, road use rule changes, and other transportation engineering measures to improve safety for motorists, car drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. It has become a tool used by urban planners and road designers to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America, where the focus is often more on facilitating motorized traffic flow. Traffic calming is a calque (literal translation) of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.

Teletraffic engineering, or telecommunications traffic engineering is the application of transportation traffic engineering theory to telecommunications. Teletraffic engineers use their knowledge of statistics including queuing theory, the nature of traffic, their practical models, their measurements and simulations to make predictions and to plan telecommunication networks such as a telephone network or the Internet. These tools and knowledge help provide reliable service at lower cost.

The field was created by the work of A. K. Erlang for circuit-switched networks but is applicable to packet-switched networks, as they both exhibit Markovian properties, and can hence be modeled by e.g. a Poisson arrival process.

Individual human mobility is the study that describes how individual humans move within a network or system. The concept has been studied in a number of fields originating in the study of demographics. Understanding human mobility has many applications in diverse areas, including spread of diseases, mobile viruses, city planning, traffic engineering, financial market forecasting, and nowcasting of economic well-being.