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Title:

A Describing Function Method for Traffic Oscillation Analysis: Environmental Impacts and Oscillation Mitigation

Accession Number:

01557696

Record Type:

Component

Availability:

Transportation Research Board Business Office

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Abstract:

Traffic oscillation incurs a number of adverse impacts to highway traffic efficiency and sustainability such as excessive travel delay, extra fuel consumption and emission. This study first adapts the describing-function (DF) based method for estimating fuel consumption and emission emerged from traffic oscillation. The authors integrate the DF approach with existing estimation models of fuel consumption and emission to analytically predict environmental impacts (i.e., unit-distance fuel consumption and emission) from traffic oscillation. The prediction results by the DF approach are validated with both computer simulation and field measurements. Further, the authors explore how to utilize advantageous features of emerging sensing, communication and control technologies, such as fast response and information sharing, to smooth traffic oscillation and reduce its environmental impacts. The authors extend the studied car-following law to incorporate these features and apply the DF approach to demonstrate how these features can help dampen the growth of oscillation and environmental impact measurements. For information sharing, the authors convert the corresponding extended car-following law into a new fixed point problem and propose a simple bisecting based algorithm to efficiently solve it. Numerical experiments show that these new car-following control strategies can effectively suppress development of oscillation amplitude and consequently mitigate fuel consumption and emission.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics.

Monograph Accession #:

01550057

Report/Paper Numbers:

15-3784

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Parsafard, Mohsen
Li, Xiaopeng
Cui, Jianxun
An, Shi

Pagination:

17p

Publication Date:

2015

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; References; Tables

Uncontrolled Terms:

Traffic oscillations

Subject Areas:

Environment; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; I15: Environment; I71: Traffic Theory

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-3784

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Dec 30 2014 1:14PM