Copyright © 2012 Mingxia Gao. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An analytical dynamic node-based model is proposed to represent flows on a traffic network and to be utilized as an integral part of a dynamic network loading (DNL) process by solving a continuous DNL problem. The proposed model formulation has an integrate base to be structured with a link load computing component, where physical queuing and its influence were explicitly taken into account by dividing a link into two parts: running part and queuing part. The solution to the model is obtained by a hybridization algorithm of simulation and analytical approach, where an iteration process is conducted to update time-dependent network flow conditions after a reasonable discretization of the problem. The performance of the proposed model, as a DNL model, is tested on a sample network. It is seen that the proposed model provides consistent approximations to link flow dynamics. The dynamic node model proposed in this paper is unique in that it explicitly models directional queue in each turning lane and the First-In-First-Out (FIFO) rule at lane level rather than link level is pursued.