Kinematic wave models of lane-drop bottlenecks

A kinematic wave theory of lane-changing traffic flow

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 cu...

A kinematic wave theory of lane-changing vehicular traffic

Frequent lane-changes in highway merging, diverging, and weaving areas often can disrupt traffic flow and, even worse, lead to accidents. For balanced lane-changing areas, where different lanes share the same traffic conditions, based on the observation that a vehicle has to take two lanes during its lane-changing period, we consider its contribution to traffic density is doubled. That is, ther...

Assessment of multi class kinematic wave models

Improved Estimates of Kinematic Wave Parameters for Circular Channels

The momentum equation in the kinematic wave model is a power-law equation with two parameters. These parameters, which relate the discharge to the flow area, are commonly derived using Manning’s equation. In general, the values of these parameters depend on the flow depth except for some special cross sections. In this paper, improved estimates of the kinematic wave parameters for circular chan...

Continuous kinematic wave models of merging traffic flow

Traffic dynamics at a merging junction can be numerically solved with discrete conservation equationsand so-called supply-demand methods. In this paper, we first introduce a continuous multi-commoditykinematic wave model of merging traffic and then develop a new framework for constructing the solutionsto its Riemann problem with jump initial conditions. In the supply-demand spac...