Estimation of road traffic state at a multi-lanes controlled junction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for estimating traffic conditions at multi-lane controlled junctions using communication data from equipped vehicles, extending previous two-lane models to three lanes and beyond.

Contribution

It extends existing traffic estimation methods to handle roads with any number of lanes using communication data from vehicles, improving accuracy and applicability.

Findings

Effective estimation of vehicle arrival rates and queue lengths demonstrated.

Method adapts to roads with any number of lanes, not just two or three.

Numerical simulations validate the proposed approach.

Abstract

We present in this paper a method for the estimation of traffic state at road junctions controlled with traffic lights. We assume mixed traffic where a proportion of vehicles are equipped with communication resources. The estimation of road traffic state uses information given by communicating vehicles. The method we propose is built upon a previously published method which was applied to estimate the traffic in the case where roads are composed of two lanes. In this paper, we consider the case where roads are composed of three lanes and we show that this solution can address the general case, where roads are composed of any number of lanes. We assume the geometry of the road junction is known, as well as its connections between incoming and outgoing lanes and roads. Using the location data provided by the communicating vehicles, first, we estimate some primary parameters including the penetration ratio of the probe vehicles, as well as the arrival rates of vehicles (equipped and non-equipped) per lane by introducing the assignment onto the lanes. Second, we give estimations of the queue length of the 3-lanes road, without and with the additional information provided by the location of the communicating vehicles in the queue. We illustrate and discuss the proposed model with numerical simulations.