Bottlenecks are critical components of freeway systems and are of increasing importance as congestion worsens in major urban areas. In the U.S., the Federal Highway Administration has launched a new initiative aimed at identifying key bottlenecks in each state. In Oregon, a freeway data archive has been established that stores vehicular count, occupancy, and speed data from over 600 locations a...

A travel time prediction algorithm scalable to large freeway networks with many nodes with arbitrary travel routes is proposed. Instead of constructing separate predictors for individual routes, it first predicts the whole future space-time field of travel times and then traverses the required subsection of the predicted travel time field to compute the travel time estimate for the requested ro...

In this study, we investigated brain mechanisms for the generation of subjective experience from objective sensory inputs. Our experimental construct was subjective tranquility. Tranquility is a mental state more likely to occur in the presence of objective sensory inputs that arise from natural features in the environment. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural res...

We now apply the model predictive control (MPC) of speed limits that we have presented in previous publications [1], [2] to a calibrated METANET model of a 19 km stretch of the real-world freeway A1 in The Netherlands. This freeway regularly suffers from shock waves originating mainly from onramps, and speed limits are now used to suppress these shock waves. First, we calibrate and validate the...

Traffic jams are an economic and environmental problem in many countries. When traffic demand exceeds the freeway capacity, shock waves can be caused by small disturbances in the traffic flow. Since it is not always desirable or feasible to add more lanes on freeways to overcome capacity problems, alternative methods have been developed to reduce and to dissolve traffic jams. One of these metho...

In this paper, a new practice-ready method for the real-time estimation of traffic conditions and travel times on highways is introduced. First, after principal component analysis, observation days historical dataset are clustered. Two different methods compared: Gaussian Mixture Model k-means algorithm. The clustering results reveal that congestion maps same group have substantial similarity i...

The operations of freeway ramp metering and urban traffic network signal control are independent in most areas. Such situation may cause some conflict between traffic streams of the two subsystems, or, at least, their dynamic interactions have not been taken into account from an overall system viewpoint. Traffic performance can be improved if the controls of these two subnetworks are integrated...

At freeway bottlenecks shock waves may appear. These shock waves result in longer travel times and in sudden, large variations in the speeds of the vehicles, which could lead to unsafe and dangerous situations. Dynamic speed limits can be used to eliminate or at least to reduce the effects of shock waves. However, in order to prevent the occurrence of new shock waves and/or negative impacts on ...

Highway assistance services, also called the freeway service patrols (FSPs), are one of the main approaches used by incident management programs. The objective of this study was to investigate the factors that contribute to people choosing to rely on the highway assistance services (FSP) in comparison to private assistance services such as the Automobile Association of America (AAA). Further th...

The adjoint method provides a computationally efficient means of calculating the gradient for applications in constrained optimization. In this article, we consider a network of scalar conservation laws with general topology, whose behavior is modified by a set of control parameters in order to minimize a given objective function. After discretizing the corresponding partial differential equati...