Abstract:
Blocking back is one of the major causes of degradation of freeway network performance. When at a freeway diverge one of the outgoing links is jammed, the traffic heading...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Blocking back is one of the major causes of degradation of freeway network performance. When at a freeway diverge one of the outgoing links is jammed, the traffic heading to the other outgoing link will often also be delayed due to the back-propagation of the jam tail into the common area upstream of the diverge. Most approaches consider this as a secondary effect of the real bottleneck on the congested link, and use this as a motivation to try to resolve the bottleneck. While this is a valid approach, in some cases this is not possible, and the traffic heading to the non-congested outgoing link will suffer from a bottleneck that is not even on their route. Here we solve the blocking back problem by separating the traffic toward the two outgoing links by dynamic lane allocation. We analyze the jam propagation and traffic state evolution for the cases with and without dynamic lane separation. Next we develop two control approaches, one based on the queue tail location and the other based on the shock wave theoretic considerations. The two controllers are evaluated by microscopic simulations for their resulting performance in terms of total travel time. The simulation results indicate that the queue tail location based controller is superior to the shock wave theory based controller.
Date of Conference: 16-19 September 2012
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 25 October 2012
ISBN Information: