EVALUATION OF HEAVY-DUTY VEHICLES EFFECTS ON THE CAPACITY OF MERGING SECTIONS USING SIMULATION AND DETECTOR DATA

摘要

This work focuses on the effects of the traffic characteristics of heavy-duty vehicles on capacity of merging sections. Consequently, to develop a strategy using a simulation and detector data for alleviating congestion at freeway merging points as well as improving the safety of these points associating to heavy-duty vehicle. In Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, traffic congestion frequently occurs at merging bottleneck sections especially under heavy traffic demand. The Tokyo Metropolitan expressway public corporation in charge of the freeways, generally applies different empirical strategies to increase the flow rate and decrease the accident rate at the merging sections. However, these strategies do not rely neither on any behavioral characteristic of the merging traffic nor on the geometric design of the merging segments. Surprisingly there have been only a few research publications concerned with the traffic behavior and characteristics in these situations. Therefore a three years extensive study has been undertaken to investigate traffic behavior and characteristics during the merging process under congested situation to design a safer and less congested merging points as well as to apply a more efficient control at these bottleneck sections.