Managing Traffic Through Work Zones: Preliminary Findings

The overall objectives of this research are to (1) define safe, efficient, reliable and cost-effective means for managing traffic in highway work zones, and (2) develop guidelines for the use of intelligent transportation system technologies for managing delay, defining variable speed limits, guiding the lane merging process, and automated enforcement. This phase of the study, carried out during the April 2004-March 2005 period, used as a starting point the construction zone queue-end warning system research of the Principal Investigator, funded by the Highway Infrastructure Innovation Funding Program of the Ministry of Transportation, Ontario. The study methodology consisted of the following steps. (1) For work zones, traffic management issues were identified and requirements for managing traffic were defined. The requirements include real time information display regarding queues, lane merge advice, and variable speed. Also, enforcement issues were studied. (2) Work zone configurations were based on Ontario Traffic Book 7 and ITS technologies were looped-in. Traffic operations were simulated by using a microsimulator (i.e., VISSIM) capable of taking into account driver behaviour regarding vehicle-following and lane changing movements. (3) From the preliminary results of merge options for a two lane per direction freeway section, speed and queuing implications were studied on the basis of simulation results. (4) The concept design of an information system was defined that integrates artificial neural network (ANN) models and intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies.