Capacity drop through reaction times in heterogeneous traffic

The capacity drop forms a major reason why the prevention of congestion is targeted by traffic management, as lower capacities are detrimental to traffic throughput. Various reasons describing the dynamics behind the capacity have been described, however one of these, reaction times, has had less explicit attention when modelling on a...

A microscopic investigation into the capacity drop: Impacts of longitudinal behavior on the queue discharge rate

The capacity drop indicates that the queue discharge rate is lower than the free-flow capacity. Studies show that the queue discharge rate varies under different traffic conditions. Empirical data show that the queue discharge rate increases as the speed in congestion increases. Insights into the underlying behavioral mechanisms that cause...

Resolving freeway jam waves by discrete first-order model-based predictive control of variable speed limits

In this paper we develop a fast model predictive control (MPC) approach for variable speed limit coordination to resolve freeway jam waves. Existing MPC approaches that are based on the second-order traffic flow models suffer from high computation load due to the non-linear and non-convex optimization formulation. In recent years, simplified...

Capacity drop: A comparison between stop-and-go wave and standing queue at lane-drop bottleneck

A kinematic wave model in Lagrangian coordinates incorporating capacity drop: Application to homogeneous road stretches and discontinuities

On freeways, congestion always leads to capacity drop. This means the queue discharge rate is lower than the pre-queue capacity. Our recent research findings indicate that the queue discharge rate increases with the speed in congestion, that is the capacity drop is strongly correlated with the congestion state. Incorporating this varying...