FORCED MERGING IN TRAFFIC

Abstract

A vehicle waiting at an intersection of a major road forces an entry into the main-stream traffic by requiring the oncoming traffic to slow down. Assuming that the main-stream traffic can be described as a renewal process, the paper examines the resulting disturbance which the forced entry creates in the main stream. After showing that it is formally equivalent to a busy period problem, explicit results are obtained in the case of Poisson traffic. It is shown that there is a minimal main-stream headway which should be forced in order to maximize the rate of entry into the major road by many waiting vehicles. Finally, two measures of accident potential are discussed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 15, 1964
Accession Number
AD0601258

Entities

People

  • W. S. Jewell

Organizations

  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accidents
  • Business Administration
  • California
  • Chain Reactions
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Collisions
  • Intervals
  • Mathematics
  • Navy
  • New Jersey
  • New York
  • Operations Research
  • Probability
  • Random Variables
  • Trajectories
  • United States
  • Universities

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