Methodology SHAKER and the Capacity Analysis of Five Toll Plazas
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 135, Issue 3
Abstract
Modeling traffic at toll collection facilities can assist in computing plaza capacity and performance. It may help planners and operators decide on which lane configurations are appropriate for specific hourly approach volumes and vehicle types. On a network of toll roadways, it can be used to identify bottleneck locations. This is accomplished by comparing a plaza’s capacity to the capacity of a highway segment’s just downstream. Both the characteristics of the approaching traffic as well as the roadway conditions before and at the plaza come into play. Choosing a lane configuration with an adequate number of dedicated electronic toll collection lanes that match the approaching traffic demand is one key to maximizing the toll plaza throughput. The capacity of a toll lane is simply the lane’s average hourly processing rate under queuing conditions as measured in the field. Measurements must take place when there is uniformity in the type of toll collected in the lane as well as uniformity in the type of vehicle being processed. The average hourly processing rates for several categories of traffic and tolling type have been measured in the field and have been collected for this study. Complexity is added to the model when configuring a mixed lane that either provides several methods of toll collection, or provides the same toll collection type to several different categories of customers, or provides toll collection in a manner that is a mixture of these two. SHAKER was developed to address these issues and compute capacities of toll plazas that consist of mixed lanes as well as dedicated lanes. This study also applied the SHAKER methodology to 5 real toll facilities plazas on the Florida Turnpike. The model was both calibrated and validated using these data.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Al-Deek, H., Mohamed, A., and Radwan, A. E. (2000). “New model for evaluation of traffic operations at electronic toll collection plazas.” Transportation Research Record. 1710, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
Barcelo, J., and Ferrer, J. L. (1998). AIMSUN2: Advanced interactive microscopic simulation for urban networks, Departmento de Estadistica e Investigation Operative, Faculdad de Informatica, Univ. de Cataluna.
Ceballos, G., and Curtis, O. (2005). “Queue analysis at toll and parking exit plazas: A comparison between multiserver queuing models and traffic simulation.” ⟨http://www.ptvamerica.com/docs/VISSIMQueueAnalysis.pdf⟩.
Chien, S., Spasovic, L., Opie, E. K., Korikanthimath, V., and Besenski, D. (2005). “Simulation-based analysis for toll plazas with multiple toll collection methods.” Proc., TRB 84th Annual Meeting (CD-ROM), Washington, D.C., poster session 636, paper 05-1160.
Lieberman, E., Chang, J., and Andrews, B. (2004). “Applying microsimulation to evaluate, plan, design and manage toll plazas.” Proc., TRB 83rd Annual Meeting, Publication No. TRB2004-002865, Washington, D.C.
Schmitt, D. (2003). “Modeling toll plaza performance; decision support system for operator.” MS thesis, Univ. of Massachusetts Dartmouth, North Dartmouth, Mass.
Smith, M. C., and Sadek, A. W. (2006). “Challenges calibrating a large-scale microscopic simulation model of a diverse urban, suburban and rural network: A practical guide.” Proc., TRB 85th Annual Meeting (CD-ROM), Washington, D.C., paper 06-2246.
Yang, Q., and Morgan, D. (2006). “A hybrid traffic simulation model.” Proc., TRB 85th Annual Meeting (CD-ROM), Washington, D.C., paper 06-2582.
Zarrillo, M. L. (1998). “Development and applications of TP model: A queuing model describing traffic operations during electronic toll collection (ETC).” Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, Fla.
Zarrillo, M. L., Radwan, A. E., and Dowd, J. H. (2002). “TNCC: Operations management and assessment tool for toll network operators.” Transportation Research Record, 1781, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
Zarrillo, M. L., Radwan, A. E., and Jaffery, A. (2003). “TNCC and the no-queue-maximum-throughput indicator at toll facilities.” Proc., Society for Computer Simulation (SCS) Int. 2003 Summer Computer Simulation Conf., A. G. Bruzzone and M. Itmi, eds., Vol. 35, No. 3, 624–629.
Zarrillo, M. L., Radwan, A. E., and Schmitt, D. (2003). “SHAKER: A maximum throughput model for toll collection facilities.” Proc., Society for Computer Simulation (SCS) Int. 2003 Summer Computer Simulation Conf., A. G. Bruzzone and M. Itmi, eds., Vol. 35, No. 3, 602–607.
Zarrillo, M. L., Radwan, A. E., and Schmitt, D. (2004). “Modeling traffic at toll collection facilities by applying vehicle properties, driver perception reaction time and stop time to the basic equations of motion from car-following theory.” Proc., TRB 83rd Annual Meeting (CD-ROM), Washington, D.C., poster session 516, paper 04-2240.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 135 • Issue 3 • March 2009
Pages: 83 - 93
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Apr 14, 2006
Accepted: Sep 11, 2008
Published online: Mar 1, 2009
Published in print: Mar 2009
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.