A kinematic wave theory of lane-changing traffic flow
By W. Jin. 2005
215 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Frequent lane-changes in highway merging, diverging, and weaving areas could disrupt traffic flow and, even worse, lead to accidents. In this paper, we propose a simple model for studying bottleneck effects of lane-changing traffic and aggregate traffic dynamics of a roadway with lane-changing areas. Based on the observation that, when changing its lane, a vehicle affects traffic on both its current and target lanes, we propose to capture such lateral interactions by introducing a new lane-changing intensity variable. With a modified fundamental diagram, we are able to study the impacts of lane-changing traffic on overall traffic flow. In addition, the corresponding traffic dynamics can be described with a simple kinematic wave model. For a location-dependent lane-changing intensity variable, we discuss kinematic wave solutions of the Riemann problem of the new model and introduce a supply-demand method for its numerical solutions. With both theoretical and empirical analysis, we demonstrate that lane-changes could have significant bottleneck effects on overall traffic flow. In the future, we will be interested in studying lane-changing intensities for different road geometries, locations, on-ramp/off-ramp flows, as well as traffic conditions. The new modeling framework could be helpful for developing ramp-metering and other lane management strategies to mitigate the bottleneck effects of lane-changes.
Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, Transportation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0e09b7fb913a5b77c3429be65b1cd26bd15ea5a
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Control and Systems Engineering
In Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
In Transportation
Citations in the corpus
- Three new models for the flow–density relationship: derivation and testing for freeway and urban data (2012, background): “( 2005 ) for the dynamic traffic assignment problem and by Jin ( 2010 ) for a macroscopic dynamic model that includes the effect of lane-changing flow.”