Identifying Recurring Bottlenecks on Urban Expressway Using a Fusion Method Based on Loop Detector Data

The accurate identification of recurrent bottlenecks has been an important assumption of many studies on traffic congestion analysis and management. As one of the most widely used traffic detection devices, loop detectors can provide reliable multidimensional data for traffic bottleneck identification. Although great efforts have been put on developing bottleneck identification methods based on loop detector data, the existing studies are less informative with respect to providing accurate position of the bottlenecks and discussing the algorithm efficiency when facing with large amount of real-time data. This paper aims at improving the quality of bottleneck identification as well as avoiding excessive data processing burden. A fusion method of loop detector data with different collection cycles is proposed. It firstly determines the occurrence and the approximate locations of bottlenecks using large cycle data considering its high accuracy in determining bottlenecks occurrence. Then, the small cycle data are used to determine the accurate location and the duration time of the bottlenecks. A case study is introduced to verify the proposed method. A large set of 30 s raw loop detector data from a selected urban expressway segment in California is used. Also, the identification result is compared with the classical transformed cumulative curves method. The results show that the fusion method is valid with bottleneck identification and location positioning. We finally conclude by discussing some future improvements and potential applications.