Lane changing models for arterial traffic

Driving behavior models for lane-changing and acceleration form an integral component of microscopic traffic simulators and determine its value in evaluation of different traffic management strategies. The state-of-art model for lane changing adopts a two-level framework: the first level involves a latent or unobserved choice of a target lane; the second level models the acceptance of adjacent gaps in the direction of the target lane. While this modeling approach has several advantages over past works, it assumes drivers to execute lane change within the same time step in which gap was found to be acceptable. In other words, under time steps typically adopted in model applications, the lane change duration is assumed to be negligibly small. However, past works report average lane change durations to the order of 5-6 seconds. Besides this practical maneuvering requirement, the assumption fails further in moderate or low density traffic conditions with ample gap sizes or low speed conditions, where lane changing maneuver can take longer than average. The work outlined in this thesis proposes an extension to the two-level framework for lane changing models through a third level that explicitly models the lane change duration.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Ramanujam, Varun

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Moshe E. Ben-Akiva.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39286

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39286