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Comparison of Analytical and Simulation results for One-Lane operation on Low Volume Two Lane Highway

Date and Time: Monday, July 24: 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: Grand Ballroom A

 

Lead Presenter: Hongjae Jeon

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Speaker Biography

Hongjae Jeon is a dedicated Ph.D. Candidate specialized in Transportation Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With a passion for optimizing work zone and incident operation, his research work has contributed to the improving of work zone operation by offering work zone training courses to 22 states. During this training course, he and his advisor developed a procedure to improve one-lane two-way operation on a two-lane highway. He also served as a teaching assistant, sharing his knowledge and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students.
His presentation will delve into comparing Analytical and Vissim simulation results for one-lane operation on low volume two lane highway.

Co-Authors 

Presentation Description/Paper Summary

Work zones with one lane closed on two-lane highways require sharing the open lane with traffic from closed directions. In such work zones the traffic control resembles to operating a two-phase signal and in rare cases a three-phase traffic signal. Temporary traffic signals (or flaggers) allow the open lane to be used in alternating manner. Signal timing (green times and cycle length) directly affects the delay and queue, and one of the most influential variables is the operating speed of vehicles in the work zone. The operating speed is affected by work zone speed limit, work intensity and speed control technique, lane and shoulder width, acceleration capability of vehicles, and work zone length. Additionally, delay and queue computations must consider queue build up that often happens in oversaturated conditions. WorkZoneQ-Pro (WZQ-Pro) is developed with a new signal timing method that considers the above mentioned factors.  The procedure can handle multiple hours of analysis with two or three phase signal operation. Test scenarios are real-world work zone examples from three different states were used to compute signal time variables and use them to compute queue and delay. These values were also computed using HCM 2016 procedures and are compared. In addition, the computed values were input to Vissim simulation software and the results were compared.  It showed that the WZQ-Pro results are reasonably close to Vissim simulation results and that further validated that acceptable agreement existed between the analytical and simulation results.

Presentation File

Poster