With the levels of congestion in cities and countries showing an ever-increasing trend, the modelling of road traffic continues to be a highly active field. Whereas numerous efforts have been undertaken towards the local and global control of traffic flows, our research is aimed at the modelling part of road traffic, more specifically traffic on motorways. The goal of this dissertation is three-fold; for starters, we provide a complete nomenclature convention within traffic flow theory, built upon a consistent set of notations. In continuation, we give an in-depth literature survey on the mathematical models used for describing road traffic flows, both from a transportation planning and a flow propagation point of view. Special attention is given to the class of cellular automata models of road traffic. Secondly, we perform an exploratory data analysis of raw traffic flow measurements, discussing the operational characteristics of single-loop detectors. This analysis also provides researchers with tools to track statistical outliers, to quickly assess structural and incidental detector failures, to estimate travel times in an off-line fashion based on raw cumulative counts, and to obtain a visual representation of traffic flow dynamics in time and space. Finally, we provide, within the context of simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment, a straightforward method to tackle both departure time choice and dynamic route choice problems in a sequential manner, built around a traffic flow model that is represented as a computationally efficient cellular automaton. Our contributions to the field of literature are distinct, in that such comprehensive overviews hitherto only existed in scattered form, whereas we provide a synthesis of the approaches concerning the description of road traffic flows. Furthermore, in contrast to most research on the numerical analysis of traffic flow measurements, we offer methods that are capable of dealing with large-scale data sets in order to get a global picture regarding the quality of the measurements. Finally, as opposed to many approaches towards the paradigm of simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment, we propose a methodology that explicitly integrates departure time choice within a simulation framework. (Author/publisher)
Abstract