Location Specific Cell Transmission Model for Freeway Traffic

This paper describes a location specific cell transmission model of freeway traffic based on the observed variability of fundamental diagrams both along and across freeway segments. This model extends the original cell transmission model (CTM) mechanism by defining various shapes of fundamental diagrams to reproduce more complex traffic phenomena, including capacity drops, lane-by-lane variations, nonhomogeneous wave propagation velocities, and temporal lags. A field test on a Canadian freeway was used to demonstrate the validity of the location specific CTM. The simulated spatio-temporal evolutions of traffic flow show that the model can be used to describe the traffic dynamics near bottlenecks more precisely than the original model.