Time Series Analysis and Models of Freeway Performance
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 8
Abstract
This paper describes a study whose primary purpose is to better understand the relationship between freeway traffic flow and speed. Incidents of recurrent and nonrecurrent congestion were encountered at six radar collection northbound locations on New Hampshire interstate I-93 in July 2010. The root cause for the onset of the recurrent congestion is explained with exploratory data analyses and a time series modeling approach. A complex combination of present and past values of traffic flow, speed, and congestion state, a congestion history of lingering effect variables, can explain the triggering and mitigation of congestion events for a highly volatile traffic environment. The approach includes two mathematical models: (1) a generalized additive binomial model to forecast the probability of congestion and (2) state-space models of speed and flow. The state-space models use a dynamic linear model (DLM) with switching structures to describe the bimodal distribution of speed and flow in the free-flow and congested states. Model selection, parameter estimation and checking are presented.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the help and support of the New Hampshire Department of Transportation, most notably Denise Markow for assistance in data acquisition. The views expressed in this paper belong to the writers and are not necessarily those of the New Hampshire Department of Transportation.
References
ASCE. (2005). “American Society of Civil Engineers 2005 report card for America.” 〈https://apps.asce.org/reportcard/2005/index.cfm〉 (Nov. 2, 2009).
Ban, X., Chu, L., and Benouar, H. (2007). “Bottleneck identification and calibration for corridor management planning.” Transportation Research Record 1999, Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC, 40–53.
Box, G. E., Hunter, W. G., and Hunter, J. (1978). Statistics for experimenters, Wiley Interscience, Hoboken, NJ.
Brilon, W., Geistefeldt, J., and Zurlinden, H. (2007). “Implementing the concept of reliability for highway capacity analysis.” Transportation Research Record 2027, Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC, 1–8.
Cassidy, M. J., Anani, S. B., and Haigwood, J. M. (2002). “Study of freeway traffic near an off-ramp.” Transp. Res. Part A Policy Pract., 36(6), 563–572.
Chen, C., Skabardonis, A., and Varaiya, P. (2004). “Systematic identification of freeway bottlenecks.” Transportation Research Record 1867, Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC, 46–52.
Deganzo, C. F. (1997). Fundamentals of transportation and traffic operations, Pergamon, Oxford, UK.
Gerlough, D. L., and Huber, M. J. (1975). Traffic flow theory—A monograph, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, Washington, DC.
Greenwood, I. D., Dunn, R. C. M., and Raine, R. R. (2007). “Estimating the effects of traffic congestion on fuel consumption and vehicle emissions based on acceleration noise.” J. Transp. Eng.JTPEDI, 133(2), 96–104.
Kampstra, P. (2008). “Beanplot: A boxplot alternative for visual comparison of distributions.” J. Stat. Software, 28, 1–9.
May, A. D. (1990). Traffic flow fundamentals, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Petris, G., Petrone, S., and Campognoli, P. (2009). Dynamic linear models with R, Springer, New York.
Shumway, R. H., and Stoffer, D. S. (2011). Time series analysis and its application with R examples, Springer, New York.
Smith, B. L, and Ulmer, J. M. (2003). “Freeway traffic flow rate measurement: Investigation into impact of measurement time interval.” J. Transp. Eng.JTPEDI, 129(3), 223–229.
Williams, B. M, and Hoel, L. A. (2003). “Modeling and forecasting vehicular traffic flow as a seasonal ARIMA process: Theoretical basis and empirical results.” J. Transp. Eng.JTPEDI, 129(6), 664–672.
Wood, S. N. (2006). Generalized additive models, an introduction with R, Chapman and Hall/CRC, London.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 8 • August 2012
Pages: 1030 - 1039
Copyright
© 2012. American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 13, 2011
Accepted: Dec 29, 2011
Published online: Jan 6, 2012
Published in print: Aug 1, 2012
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.