Abstract:

On the basis of field collected data and aiming at the large amount of bus traffic flow in urban arterials in China, this paper investigates the special operation characteristics of buses different from cars. Then, by using the truncated normal distribution of speed and by adopting the average stop time of buses in the station, a density dis-persion model of bus platoon in the presence of bus station in adjacent intersections is proposed. The dispersion characteristics of the bus platoon that moves down along the road during the green time are analyzed, and a piece-wise density distribution function of the bus flow is constructed in time-space coordinates. Moreover, by taking the signal coordination control of an intersection with a bus station as the example, an expression is deduced to calcu-late the number of cars in the conditions in which the front of the platoon has passed but the rear of the platoon has not passed a downstream point. Besides, the flow distribution mode in the upstream and downstream intersections is analyzed. Case study and numerical analysis show that the proposed model is effective.

Key words: traffic engineering, traffic flow, bus platoon, density dispersion model, truncated normal distribution, signal coordination control