Oscillatory Traffic Flow Patterns Induced by Queue Spillback in a Simple Road Network

Yu (Marco) Nie () and H. Michael Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Yu (Marco) Nie: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208
H. Michael Zhang: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis, Davis, California 95616

Transportation Science, 2008, vol. 42, issue 2, 236-248

Abstract: We study in this paper some consequences of queue spillback in a simple road network with a steady demand and provide exact formulas for traffic flow patterns. This one origin-destination pair, two-route network contains a diverge and a merge, and the interaction of queues formed at the merge produces several interesting traffic flow patterns, of which two types of oscillatory solutions are of particular interest. One of the oscillatory solutions is decaying, and the other is perfectly periodic. The latter resembles the stop-and-go pattern found in real-world traffic. Because a general road network usually contains many components like the simple network studied here, interaction of queues at junctions provides an alternative explanation to the formation of stop-and-go traffic.

Keywords: vehicular traffic oscillations; stop-and-go traffic; kinematic wave theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.1070.0229 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:42:y:2008:i:2:p:236-248

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().