This paper reports on a four-year project being undertaken in the UK, which intends to address the causative mechanisms of motorway congestion, and how these may be overcome by the use of in-vehicle Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). The project comprises five studies, two focusing on driver behaviour and performance, and three on microscopic simulation and road operations. This paper provides an overview of progress made and work in progress in the former of these topics. Phase 1: an instrumented vehicle study collecting microscopic time series on how drivers behave in slow moving dense traffic. An overview of results from this phase is presented. Phase 2: to be initiated in late 2001, looks to examine how drivers behave when faced with the requirement for an emergency deceleration. The study uses a combination of a surrogate vehicle/test track approach and a fixed base driving simulator study, in order to examine the advantages of the differing methodologies and (if validity is proven) to increase database size. A brief review is given of the intended use of outputs from these studies in subsequent simulation modelling studies to be undertaken in future years.
Abstract