Simulation-based Study on a Lane Assignment Approach for Freeway Weaving Section

This paper presents a simulation study of a lane assignment approach for improving the operation of freeway weaving sections. By dividing the vehicles with different destinations into different lanes, this approach offers an effective way to reduce the “friction” of lane-changing maneuvers and relieve impacts of congestion of the through traffic in freeway. Introduction of the preliminary configuration and principal components associated with the proposed lane assignments approach contribute to the core of this research. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, this study conducts sufficient simulation experiments based on a freeway simulator calibrated with real-world weaving section data. The results show that under heavily congested traffic conditions this system can perform better than traditional one considering the weaving section throughput, the average vehicle delay, queue length on freeway and on ramp, the interference with freeway, and the stability of weaving section. This paper also investigates factors related to critical traffic flow that may affect the performance of such a system.