Report

The current state-of-the-practice in the Dutch operational road traffic management is mostly based on experience: the traffic manager judges the traffic dynamics on a road network on the basis of their previous experience and select the right control measures. As the amount of data and number of possible control measures available increases in the future, the Dutch operational traffic management needs to implement a good decision support system as the traffic managers can’t handle all this (possibly conflicting) information simultaneously. This decision support system should provide a clear view of the current and near-future situation on which the right control… Read More »Short-term traffic prediction in road traffic control centres

The main cause of congestion is the highway demand exceeding the capacity. Especially in bottleneck locations, congestion is more easily formed. On-ramps are among these locations, where vehicles from the on-ramp and vehicles on the highway want to use the same infrastructure. Merging is a sub-component of lane changing; it refers to lane changes but only regarding vehicles entering a new traffic stream. The interference between merging and highway vehicles results in disturbances at the merging location leading to congestions upstream. The objective of the research described in the report is to define which Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are the… Read More »Congestion minimisation by optimising merging behaviour through Intelligent Transportation Systems

The study has been conducted in order to develop a method to determine in which situations unbundling (i.e. the separation of traffic flows), can be used to solve bottlenecks on motorways. Although unbundling has already been applied in the Netherlands, success of this method has been varying. It remains unclear in which situations this measure can lead to an effective and robust solution. Two main goals were set for this study. On the one hand, the situations in which unbundling can be considered an option and on the other hand, circumstances under which unbundling can be deemed beneficial. This led… Read More »Unbundling of traffic flows

This report addresses automated driving (AD) of trucks in platoons: truck platooning. Truck platooning is defined as two or more trucks driving at reduced inter-vehicle gaps (typically less than one second, corresponding with a distance of less than 22 m at 80 km/h) enabled by wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication and of which both longitudinal and lateral control are automated. As automated vehicles on public roads become more common, road authorities have to consider action to facilitate and regulate their introduction. Before truck platooning can be introduced, platooning technology will have to prove itself safe and reliable. A main challenge lies in… Read More »Impacts of truck platooning at motorway on-ramps

Efforts have been undertaken to reduce congestion levels on the road. A traffic management solution that does not rely on the development and the enrollment of new technologies (such as connected and autonomous vehicles) and that entails a high compliance rate is ramp metering. The currently existing ramp metering control strategies are of a macroscopic nature. This means that the average occupancy or average flow values on the main lane determine the temporarily fixed cycle times for the traffic light located near the on-ramp to control the inflow from the on-ramp. In this thesis, it is investigated to what extent… Read More »Ramp metering: A microscopic control approach – A case study in the Netherlands