An Automated Detection Framework for Multiple Highway Bottleneck Activations

An Automated Detection Framework for Multiple Highway Bottleneck Activations

Nguyen, T.T. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
Calvert, S.C. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
Vu, Hai L. (Swinburne University of Technology; Monash University)
van Lint, J.W.C. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)

2021

Highway bottlenecks are responsible for the majority of traffic congestion. Although the problem of bottleneck detection is not new, contemporary methods have not solved the problem thoroughly with regards to bottleneck locations, activation time, and related congestion tracking. These elements are essential for identifying and characterizing a bottleneck. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for detecting and extracting these features of highway bottlenecks from traffic data. We particularly focus on questions (i) whether a bottleneck is the primary source of congestion or (ii) whether it is activated due to congestion caused by another downstream bottleneck. The underlying principles of the proposed method include the detection of congestion (in spatio-temporal patterns of traffic congestion), and the detection of speed discontinuities in traffic data (since this is an important indicator of a bottleneck activation). The method is data-driven and automatic therefore can be easily applied to different highways and used to obtain meaningful statistics of existing bottlenecks. We have tested the method on simulated data and also demonstrated it on real data from a busy highway section in the Netherlands. The results suggest that the method is robust to different implementations, i.e. locations, of loop-detectors which measure traffic at discrete locations.

highway bottleneck
bottleneck detection
congestion detection
active contour
Chan-Vese
Adaptive Smoothing Method
logistic function
Smoothing methods
Roads
Time series analysis
logistic function.
Topology
adaptive smoothing method
Network topology
Detectors
Tin
Highway bottleneck

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:639b66dc-5a60-423f-b717-2d6429867164

https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2021.3055640

2021-08-10

1524-9050

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 23 (6), 5678-5692

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 T.T. Nguyen, S.C. Calvert, Hai L. Vu, J.W.C. van Lint