Representation of capacity drop at a road merge via point constraints in a first order traffic model

Abstract

We reproduce the capacity drop phenomenon at a road merge by implementing a non-local point constraint at the junction in a first order traffic model. We call capacity drop the situation in which the outflow through the junction is lower than the receiving capacity of the outgoing road, as too many vehicles trying to access the junction from the incoming roads hinder each other. In this paper, we first construct an enhanced version of the locally constrained model introduced by Haut et al. (Proceedings 16th IFAC World Congress. Prague, Czech Republic 229 (2005) TuM01TP/3), then we propose its counterpart featuring a non-local constraint and finally we compare numerically the two models by constructing an adapted finite volumes scheme.