Simulation and analysis of road construction traffic flow in urban road networks

Road construction is an important source of occasional urban road network traffic congestion. In this article, a new cellular automaton model is proposed to simulate road construction traffic flow in urban two-way-six-lane network systems with roundabout intersections. In the proposed model, a three-lane traffic rule is adopted to represent vehicle movements on road sections, turning lane changing and overtaking lane changing are allowed, and vehicle movements in intersection areas are determined by priority which relies on vehicle position. Simulation results show that increasing the closed lane number may lead to decline of the network speed. We also found that there is a relatively fixed influence range of road construction in different cases, and a proper proportion of vehicle bypass can improve the operation efficiency of road network when semi-closed construction.