Lane Group–Based Traffic Model for Assessing On-Ramp Traffic Impact
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 147, Issue 2
Abstract
On-ramp merging areas are congestion-prone segments of freeways. Depending on the aggressiveness of the driving population and the congestion level, the speed variance among travel lanes due to lane changes and ramp-merging flows may be so significant as to affect the optimal settings of deployed traffic control systems, such as metering rates or advisory speed limits. Extending from METANET, this study presents a lane group–based (LGB) traffic model to reflect the temporal and spatial distributions of traffic conditions among lane groups. The proposed model would allow traffic engineers to reliably assess the impacts of lane-changing activities in both upstream and downstream segments of an on-ramp area and better design their coordinated control strategies. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed model, this study has compared its performance with METANET under various traffic scenarios. The comparison results show that the proposed model can yield up to 26.9% improvement on the accuracy of predicting the temporal and spatial evolution of a freeway’s speed at the interchange area where freeway segments often experience extensive lane-changing activities due to on-ramp merging flows.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study, such as speed and flow rates, are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 147 • Issue 2 • February 2021
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 17, 2020
Accepted: Sep 1, 2020
Published online: Nov 17, 2020
Published in print: Feb 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Apr 17, 2021
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