Systematic Evaluation of A Centralized Non-Recurrent Queue Management System

Vehicle incidents or anomalous slow/stopping vehicles will generate non-recurrent queues and partially block roads. The queues will result in unbalanced lane-level traffic, and the large speed differences among lanes increase the difficulty for the queued vehicles to make lane changes to avoid downstream congestion. In this paper, a centralized non-recurrent queue management (C-NRQM) system is implemented to assist connected vehicles around non-recurrent queues with advisory speed and lane changing instructions to mitigate road congestion as well as to minimize the travel time delay and risk of collisions of all vehicles. A systematic evaluation of the system is conducted with microscopic traffic simulations to assess its mobility and safety benefits under different market penetration rates (MPRs) of connected vehicles. The socially responsibility of the system on the fairness of all road users and its performance under a competing environment with different connected vehicle applications are also evaluated to illustrate its real-world implementations in the future transportation systems. The system can reduces travel time delay by more than 80% for road with medium congestion, and more than 50% for more congested roads. Also, the system evaluation demonstrates that the centralized management has a distinct advantage on improving network performance at high MPRs of connected vehicles and eliminating the negative impact of the competition of different mobility services