@article{ref1,
title="A kinematic wave theory of lane-changing traffic flow",
journal="Transportation research part B: methodological",
year="2010",
author="Jin, Wen-Long",
volume="44",
number="8-9",
pages="1001-1021",
abstract="Frequent lane-changes in highway merging, diverging, and weaving areas could disrupt traffic flow and, even worse, lead to accidents. In this paper, we propose a simple model for studying bottleneck effects of lane-changing traffic and aggregate traffic dynamics of a roadway with lane-changing areas. Based on the observation that, when changing its lane, a vehicle affects traffic on both its current and target lanes, we propose to capture such lateral interactions by introducing a new lane-changing intensity variable. With a modified fundamental diagram, we are able to study the impacts of lane-changing traffic on overall traffic flow. In addition, the corresponding traffic dynamics can be described with a simple kinematic wave model. For a location-dependent lane-changing intensity variable, we discuss kinematic wave solutions of the Riemann problem of the new model and introduce a supply-demand method for its numerical solutions. With both theoretical and empirical analysis, we demonstrate that lane-changes could have significant bottleneck effects on overall traffic flow. In the future, we will be interested in studying lane-changing intensities for different road geometries, locations, on-ramp/off-ramp flows, as well as traffic conditions. The new modeling framework could be helpful for developing ramp-metering and other lane management strategies to mitigate the bottleneck effects of lane-changes.<p />",
language="en",
issn="0191-2615",
doi="10.1016/j.trb.2009.12.014",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trb.2009.12.014"
}