Traffic Wave Models for the Urban Road With a Work Zone

The work zones greatly change the traffic wave characteristics on the urban road and further significantly influence the signal timing schemes. However, studies on the traffic wave under the influence of work zones are limited. This paper attempts to investigate how a work zone changes the traffic wave propagation characteristics. The traffic wave profiles for different scenarios are analyzed to explore the propagation characteristics of the traffic waves. Then the novel models for the various traffic waves are proposed. Furthermore, a real case study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed models. The study indicates on the road with the work zone, the lane-blockage phenomenon is more likely to occur, which can be improved by releasing the left-turn vehicles before the through-right vehicles in the intersection signal scheme. The case study shows the proposed models have good performance, with the MAPE value of 20%.