A TRAFFIC FUNDAMENTAL DIAGRAM CALIBRATING METHODOLOGY TO AVOID UNBALANCED SPEED–DENSITY OBSERVATIONS

Abstract

Traffic fundamental diagram is extremely important to analyse traffic flow and traffic capacity, and the central part of traffic fundamental diagram is to calibrate speed–density relationship. However, because of unbalanced speed–density observations, calibrating results using Least Square Method (LSM) with all speed–density points always lead to inaccurate effect, so this paper proposed a selecting data sample method and then LSM was used to calibrate four well-known single-regime models. Comparisons were made among the results using LSM with all speed–density points and the selecting data sample. Results indicated that the selecting data sample method proposed by this paper can calibrate the singleregime models well, and the method overcomes the inaccurate effect caused by unbalanced speed–density observations. Data from different highways validated the results. The contribution of this paper is that the proposed method can help researchers to determine more precise traffic fundamental diagram.