Traffic Operations and Management

This report describes a reinterpretation of how the philosophy underlying the Cartesiusmulti-jurisdictional incident management prototype can be used as an organizing princi-ple for real-world multi-jurisdictional systems. This interpretation focuses on the power ofthe Distributed Problem Solving (DPS) approach Cartesius uses to partition analysis andoptimization functions in the system across jurisdictions. This partitioning minimizes theamount of local information that must be shared between jurisdictions and paves the way fordefining a collection of TMC-to-TMC messages that support the...

This paper describes the behavior of traffic in a homogeneous highway according to the hydrodynamic theory, in the special casewhere the flow-density relationship is triangular; i.e. when only two wave velocities exist. It presents an exact formula thatpredicts the vehicle that would be found at position x at time t, given the locations of all the vehicles at time zero. The formula, which does not require identification of the vehicle positions at intermediate times, automatically accounts for the creation and dissipation of any shocks. It can be used to calculate system performance...

This project will further adapt and enhance the previous research of relevance to event-based Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) and implement the algorithms for traffic management in Anaheim. The implementation involves the Caltrans-UCI ATMS research testbed framework at the UCI Institute of Transportation Studies, as well as the physical hardware available for communication to the city of Anaheim. The analytical algorithms proposed for use here include those for static and dynamic traffic assignment. and the modeling schemes used are the result of previous PATH and Testbed...

This report documents the second year of a project using economics experimental techniques to investigate novel approaches for mitigating congestion caused by non-recurring traffic incidents. The first year demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and carried out a number of experiments using University of California, Irvine (UCI) undergraduates as experimental subjects. The experimental platform is described in Section 3 of this report. Most of the experiments conducted during the first year examined different variable message sign (VMS) wording, and later experiments examined...