Predicting Impacts of Intelligent Transportation Systems on Freeway Queue Discharge Flow Variability

This study focuses on the problem of measuring the queue discharge flow rates for a nonbottleneck freeway section and on developing an approach for estimating the impacts of intelligent transportation system (ITS) measures on the mean and variance of the queue discharge flow rate. The whole-year mean and variance of the queue discharge flow rates for the subject section of freeway are computed on the basis of measured 5-min congested flow rates over the course of a year. The flow data are categorized into congested and uncongested flows on the basis of a speed threshold that separates congested flow conditions from uncongested conditions. The speed threshold is determined by plotting the change in speed between observations and identifying the speed at which speed is most unstable. The mean and variance of queue discharge flow rates for incident conditions are then computed by identifying when incidents were present on the freeway over the course of a year, identifying the corresponding flow rates in the study section for those periods, and segregating the observed flow rates for incidents into congested and uncongested flows by using the same speed threshold as before. Once the means and variances of the queue discharge flow rates have been obtained for the whole year and for incident conditions during the year, the variance decomposition formula is used to compute the mean and variance of queue discharge flow rates for nonincident conditions during the year. A methodology is then proposed and demonstrated for computing the impact of ITS measures (such as faster incident detection or improved congested flow rates during incidents) on the observed portion of the total variance that is attributable to incidents susceptible to amelioration with ITS measures. This same approach can also be used to compute the effectiveness of measures to reduce other causes of nonrecurrent congestion.