KINEMATIC WAVE SPEED OF FLOW-DENSITY MODELS OF VEHICULAR TRAFFIC FLOW

Kinematic wave speed represents the propagation of information within traffic states. How well equilibrium functional form of an empirical fundamental diagram predicts this parameter determines how well a kinematic wave model replicates observed traffic phenomena during simulation. In the light of this, we investigated the kinematic wave speed prediction of some selected functional forms of an empirical fundamental diagram. GA400 data was used to calibrate the models and access their fitting accuracy. The first derivatives of the selected models were plotted against density, and the predicted jam density for each model was substituted into its derivative to determine its kinematic wave speed at jam. The results show that the newly proposed model [14] produces the most likely kinematic wave speed observe on GA400 highway followed the model [2 and 17] respectively. These result shows that the proposed model could be more suitable for dynamic analysis using kinematic wave model.