Estimation of Traffic Demand at Freeway Work Zones

An iterative process, combining a macroscopic simulator and a set of the traffic demand-change estimation models, is developed to estimate the traffic demand at work zones in urban freeway corridors. The process is designed to capture the interaction between work zone conditions and traffic diversion in determining the traffic demand approaching the entrance and exit ramps at a given work zone. The proposed models and process were calibrated and tested with the field data from the work zones in the Minnesota metro-freeway network. The test results indicate promising possibilities of the proposed process in terms of the estimation accuracy and transferability of the demand-change estimation models developed in this study.