Abstract

Travel time is a key transportation performance measure because of its diverse applications. Various modeling approaches to estimating freeway travel time have been well developed due to widespread installation of intelligent transportation system sensors. However, estimating accurate travel time using existing freeway travel time models is still challenging under congested conditions. Therefore, this study aimed to develop an innovative freeway travel time estimation model based on the General Motors (GM) car-following model. Since the GM model is usually used in a microsimulation environment, the concepts of virtual leading and virtual following vehicles are proposed to allow the GM model to be used in macroscale environments using aggregated traffic sensor data. Travel time data collected from three study corridors on I-270 in Saint Louis, Missouri, were used to verify the estimated travel times produced by the proposed General Motors travel time estimation (GMTTE) model and two existing models, the instantaneous model and the time-slice model. The results showed that the GMTTE model out-performed the two existing models due to lower mean average percentage errors of 1.62% in free-flow conditions and 6.66% in two congested conditions. Overall, the GMTTE model demonstrated its robustness and accuracy for estimating freeway travel times.

Department(s)

Computer Science

Research Center/Lab(s)

Intelligent Systems Center

Keywords and Phrases

Intelligent Systems; Traffic Control; Aggregated Traffics; Car Following Models; Diverse Applications; Following Vehicle; Intelligent Transportation Systems; Performance Measure; Travel Time Estimation; Travel Time Model; Travel Time

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0361-1981

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2016 National Research Council, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2016

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