Self-Similar Behavior of Highway Road Traffic and Performance Analysis at Toll Plazas
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 10
Abstract
Until recently, the Poisson process has been used to model internet and road traffic queues. It has been established that internet traffic exhibits self-similarity, which is very different from the Poisson process. Motivated by this, efforts have been made to examine whether road traffic is also self-similar. Earlier efforts in this direction indicate that road traffic is indeed self-similar. To substantiate this, this paper examines, by various methods, whether real time traffic on a busy national highway in India is self-similar. The results from this examination prove that the traffic observed on the highway is self-similar. This paper also presents a novel method based on percentiles for computing the Hurst parameter, which is an indicator for the intensity of self-similarity. The paper also validates the percentile method with two other existing methods. Additionally, the traffic at a toll plaza on the highway has been modelled as queueing system, and performance measures have also been computed, namely, mean queue length and busy period distribution. The numerical results clearly demonstrate that the analysis presented in this paper can be useful for improved designs of toll plazas.
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Acknowledgments
Two authors (MRD, RD) would like to acknowledge Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India, for its funding to RD through Junior Research Fellow (JRF) Scheme.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 10 • October 2012
Pages: 1233 - 1238
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 10, 2011
Accepted: Mar 6, 2012
Published online: Mar 8, 2012
Published in print: Oct 1, 2012
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