Two-lane highway simulation and analysis.
详细信息
文摘
With the rapid growth of urban areas and the corresponding traffic demands,rural areas are experiencing significant growth as well. This growth is now resulting in congestion on facilities that did not have any before. One area that is becoming a concern,particularly in Florida,is rural areas transitioning into more developed areas. Access to these areas is usually by two-lane highways,and sometimes,there may be an occasional traffic signal within such facilities. Appropriate analysis tools are very important for researchers to evaluate the operations on complex two-lane highways. However,the current state-of-the-art two-lane highway simulation tool,TWOPAS,is not capable of modeling signalized intersections within a two-lane highway facility. Meanwhile,the two-lane highway analysis procedure in the current Highway Capacity Manual HCM) does not account for interruptions to the flow,such as from signals. To further investigate the traffic operation within these areas,a simulation tool and a facility-level analysis methodology are desired. In this study,two-lane highway modeling capability is incorporated into CORSIM by making the necessary additions and modifications to the existing CORSIM software code base. The primary issues addressed here are modeling passing maneuvers in an oncoming lane or a passing-lane section. Preliminary testing in this part showed that the results produced by the developed two-lane highway modeling logic are reasonably consistent with expected traffic flow theory and field observations discussed in the literature. Based on the new modeling capability,an analytical methodology for analyzing two-lane highway facilities with various features was developed based upon the previous study done by Yu and Washburn 2009). Specifically,the vehicular data generated by CORSIM was used to distinguish the influence area of a signalized intersection from basic two-lane highway segments to accomplish facility segmentation. A two-lane highway facility combined with signalized intersections can then be evaluated based on the aggregate service measures) over different types of segments. The service measure percent delay was examined and verified for its efficacy in assessing the operations on complex two-lane highway facilities,especially the ones with signalized intersections.