Research On Urban Work Zone Vehicle Merging Model Based On Traffic Conflict Technique And Its Application

With the development of urban road infrastructure construction, more and more work zones appear in urban road system. While providing convenience for construction operations, work zone will also bring some negative impacts on traffic. According to researches, the merging behavior of vehicle in merging area is a key factor effecting on smoothness and safety of traffic in work zone. Hence, it is necessary to study the vehicle’s merging behavior in merging area. This paper aims to build a vehicle merging model based on traffic conflict technique (TCT) for predicting vechicle’s merging behavior in urban work zone merging area. Moreover, we desire to apply this model to solve some practical urban work zone traffic problems.First, this paper summarised the existing vehicle merging model and got inspiration to develop the work zone vehicle merging model. Additional, many studies on TCT had been reviewed, it was innovative and feasible to introduce the index of time to collision (TTC) into the work zone vehicle merging model.Second, this paper make a brief introduction to the definition and classification of work zones, as well as traffic characteristics in work zone. It provides a good theoretical basis for the following research.Third, we gained the traffic flow basic data and TCT-based vehicle merging data in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 work zone merging area via field survey in Singapore. The former is used to reveal the difference of traffic flow characteristics between different lanes in merging area, and the latter provides data support for the construction of the work zone vehicle merging model.Based on vehicle merging data, we developed urban work zone vehicle merging model by using the classification and regression tree (CART).17 "If-Then" merging rules were extracted from the CART and showed that the merging delay, the vehicle speed, the vehicle position and the TTCs between related vehicles will effect on merging behavior decision significantly. In addition, the superiority of the work zone vehicle merging model was confirmed in this paper.Finally, the work zone vehicle merging model was introduced into the microscopic traffic simulation-Paramics by means of application programming interface functions for guiding the choice of merge control strategy in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 work zone. The simulation results suggested that the early merge control strategy should be adopted when traffic volume is small. Oppositely, with the rise of the traffic volume level, late merge control strategy will become the optimal control strategy in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 work zone.