Catastrophe theory and patterns in 30-second freeway traffic data— Implications for incident detection

This paper analyses 30-second data on flows, occupancies, and average speeds of freeway operations near bottlenecks caused by incidents. These data are seen to be very poorly explained by the conventional traffic flow theory, but to accord quite well with a recently proposed model based on catastrophe theory. One of the key areas in which the catastrophe theory model fits the data better than conventional models is with regard to the …