A lane changing assistance system that advises drivers of safe gaps for making mandatory lane changes at lane drops is developed. Bayes classifier and decision-tree methods were applied to model lane changes. Detailed vehicle trajectory data from the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) data set were used for model development (U.S. Highway 101) and testing (Interstate 80). The model predicts driver decisions on whether to merge or not as a function of certain input variables. The best results were obtained when both Bayes and decision-tree classifiers were combined into a single classifier using a majority voting principle. The prediction accuracy was 94.3% for nonmerge events and 79.3% for merge events. In a lane change assistance system, the accuracy of nonmerge events is more critical than merge events. Misclassifying a nonmerge event as a merge event could result in a traffic crash, whereas misclassifying a merge event as a nonmerge event would only result in a lost opportunity to merge. Sensitivity analysis performed by assigning higher misclassification cost for nonmerge events resulted in even higher accuracy for nonmerge events but lower accuracy for merge events.

None of numerous existing traffic flow forecasting models focus on work zones. Work zone events create conditions that are different from both normal operating conditions and incident conditions. In this paper, four models were developed for forecasting traffic flow for planned work zone events. The four models are random forest, regression tree, multilayer feedforward neural network, and nonparametric regression. Both long-term and short-term traffic flow forecasting applications were investigated. Long-term forecast involves forecasting 24 h in advance using historical traffic data, and short-term forecasts involves forecasting 1 h and 45, 30, and 15 min in advance using real-time temporal and spatial traffic data. Models were evaluated using data from work zone events on two types of roadways, a freeway, i.e., I-270, and a signalized arterial, i.e., MO-141, in St. Louis, MO, USA. The results showed that the random forest model yielded the most accurate long-term and short-term work zone traffic flow forecasts. For freeway data, the most influential variables were the latest interval's look-back traffic flows at the upstream, downstream, and current locations. For arterial data, the most influential variables were the traffic flows from the three look-back intervals at the current location only.

Vehicle reidentification is the process of matching vehicles from one point on the roadway (one field of view) to the next. By performing vehicle reidentification, important traffic parameters including travel time, travel time variability, section density, and partial dynamic origin/destination demands can be obtained. Field traffic data were collected in Alton Parkway in Southern California for training and testing of the multidetector vehicle reidentification algorithm. These data consisted of inductive loop signatures of vehicles that traversed two detector stations spanning a section of an arterial and the corresponding video of these signatures. Even though the video collected was not optimized for pattern-recognition purposes, an investigation into the feasibility of fusing inductive vehicle signatures with video for anonymous vehicle reidentification was conducted. The resulting reidentification rate of over 90% shows that this approach merits further investigation. The results also show that the use of detector fusion provides system redundancy and yields slightly better results than the use of a single detector.

Travel time is the reciprocal of speed and is a useful measure of road congestion and traffic system performance. Travel time is also a basic traffic variable that is used in many intelligent transportation system strategies such as route guidance, incident detection, and traveler information systems. Previously, speeds were mainly acquired from double inductive loops configured as speed traps, because single loop speed estimates based on assumptions of a constant vehicle length were inaccurate. However, more accurate measurements of speed can now be accomplished with single loops by utilizing inductive waveforms of vehicles that are output from newer detector cards. An algorithm using signal processing and statistical methods was developed to extract speeds from inductive waveforms. The results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than conventional single loop estimation methods. The results also show that the algorithm is robust under different traffic conditions and is transferrable across ...