The scheduling utility plays a fundamental role in addressing the commuting travel behaviours. A new scheduling utility,termed as DMRD-SU, was suggested based on some recent research findings in behavioural economics. DMRD-SU admitted the existence of positive arrival-caused utility. In addition, besides the travel-time-caused utility and arrival-caused utility, DMRD-SU firstly took the departure utility into account. The necessity of the departure utility in trip scheduling was analyzed comprehensively,and the corresponding individual trip scheduling model was presented. Based on a simple network, an analytical example was executed to characterize DMRD-SU. It can be found from the analytical example that: 1) DMRD-SU can predict the accumulation departure behaviors at NDT, which explains the formation of daily serious short-peak-hours in reality, while MRD-SU cannot; 2)Compared with MRD-SU, DMRD-SU predicts that people tend to depart later and its gross utility also decreases faster. Therefore,the departure utility should be considered to describe the traveler's scheduling behaviors better.
A control strategy of variable speed limits(VSL)was developed to reduce the travel time at freeway recurrent bottleneck areas.The proposed control strategy particularly focused on preventing the capacity drop and increasing the discharge flow.A cell transmission model(CTM)was developed to evaluate the effects of the proposed VSL control strategy on the traffic operations.The results show that the total travel time is reduced by 25.5% and the delay is reduced by 56.1%.The average travel speed is increased by 34.3% and the queue length is reduced by 31.0%.The traffic operation is improved by the proposed VSL control strategy.The way to use the proposed VSL control strategy in different types of freeway bottlenecks was also discussed by considering different traffic flow characteristics.It is concluded that the VSL control strategy is effective for merge bottlenecks but is less effective for diverge bottlenecks.
On-line estimation of the state of traffic based on data sampled by electronic detectors is important for intelligent traffic management and control. Because a nonlinear feature exists in the traffic state, and because particle filters have good characteristics when it comes to solving the nonlinear problem, a genetic resampling particle filter is proposed to estimate the state of freeway traffic. In this paper, a freeway section of the northern third ring road in the city of Beijing in China is considered as the experimental object. By analysing the traffic-state characteristics of the freeway, the traffic is modeled based on the second-order validated macroscopic traffic flow model. In order to solve the particle degeneration issue in the performance of the particle filter, a genetic mechanism is introduced into the resampling process. The realization of a genetic particle filter for freeway traffic-state estimation is discussed in detail, and the filter estimation performance is validated and evaluated by the achieved experimental data.
