Traffic Operations and Management

In this article, we propose a computational method for solving the Lighthill–Whitham–Richards (LWR) partial differential equation (PDE) semi-analytically for arbitrary piecewise-constant initial and boundary conditions, and for arbitrary concave fundamental diagrams. With these assumptions, we show that the solution to the LWR PDE at any location and time can be computed exactly and semi-analytically for a very low computational cost using the cumulative number of vehicles formulation of the problem. We implement the proposed computational method on a representative traffic flow scenario...

Estimating and analyzing traffic conditions on large arterial networks is an inherently difficult task. The first goal of this article is to demonstrate how arterial traffic conditions can be estimated using sparsely sampled GPS probe vehicle data provided by a small percentage of vehicles. Traffic signals, stop signs, and other flow inhibitors make estimating arterial traffic conditions significantly more difficult than estimating highway traffic conditions. To address these challenges, a statistical modeling framework is proposed that leverages a large historical database and...