An Assessment of the Cell-Transmission Traffic Flow Paradigm: Development and Applications

This paper provides an extensive review of the research studies employing the cell-transmission model (CTM). Daganzo’s original development of CTM was mainly intended to provide transportation planners with another way of predicting traffic behavior for a given roadway section. However, this study found that while the original scope of the cell-transmission model was rather limited to a certain range of applications, many researchers identified CTM as a reasonable modeling framework for a larger array of applications. While, several studies provide variations of the original model with adjusted to serve different specific purposes, it is interesting to find out that the original modeling principles (i.e. the fundamental traffic flow diagram and partial difference equations) are almost unaltered. Researchers employed CTM in many real-world transportation applications such as dynamic traffic assignment, signal control, ramp metering, and traffic prediction. Several traffic simulators were developed based on CTM while others integrated it for modeling specific facilities. CTM development was extended beyond modeling vehicular traffic and some studies proposed CTM as a modeling paradigm for predicting air traffic flow and pedestrian movements. The review provided here is helpful for transportation researchers and practitioners to estimate the potential of CTM and help them decide its applicability in various areas of interest. While the development of the model is not necessarily complete, more work is needed for calibration and validation of the existing applications. This is expected to be done as more real-world data becomes available and as necessity for implementation and usage by transportation practitioners.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • The DVD lists the title of this paper as: Assessment of the Cell-Transmission Traffic Flow Paradigm: Development and Applications.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Alecsandru, Ciprian
  • Quddus, Abdul
  • Huang, Kuo Cheng
  • Rouhieh, Behzad
  • Khan, Ali Raza
  • Zeng, Qingjie
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2011-1-23 to 2011-1-27
• Date: 2011

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 25p
• Monograph Title: TRB 90th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Calibration; Dynamic traffic assignment; Pedestrian movement; Ramp metering; Traffic data; Traffic flow; Traffic signal control systems; Traffic simulation; Transportation planning; Travel behavior; Validation
• Uncontrolled Terms: Cell transmission models; Real world data
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01340749
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 11-1152
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: May 24 2011 7:42AM