Modeling of Traffic Flow on Indian Expressways using Simulation Technique

Expressways in India are vastly different from other roads of the country as bicycles, two-wheelers, three-wheelers and bullock carts are not allowed to ply on these facilities and the traffic essentially consists of cars and trucks. Nevertheless, there is not much research literature specific to these categories of roads. Hence, this work aims to model traffic flow on Indian Expressways by evaluating Passenger Car Unit (PCU) or Passenger Car Equivalents (PCE) of different vehicle categories at different volume levels in a level terrain using the micro-simulation model, VISSIM. This work also aims to evaluate capacity of expressways and to study the effect of vehicle composition on PCU values. It has been found that PCU decreases with increase in volume-capacity ratio irrespective of vehicle category. The study also revealed that at a given volume level, the PCU of a given vehicle category decreases when its own proportion in the stream increases.