Detection of lane-blocking on freeway segments using relative speed and lane changing trajectory

This paper proposes and assesses a lane-blocking detection methodology using relative speed and the correlations of lane changing trajectories of the vehicles to detect a lane-blocking incident. Using a microscopic traffic simulation environment, we show that the proposed algorithm has higher detection rate and lower false alarm rate than an existing algorithm using lane changing probabilities when the pre-determined window size is small. The proposed algorithm also performs well even when the relative speed and the lane information are available only from a fraction of the complete population of vehicles.