抄録
The understanding of merging operational quality for expressway is very important to transportation engineers in planning, designing and maintaining the highways. Projected traffic demands along with the estimated facilities requirement to support the traffic are crucial inputs to the planning of infrastructure expansions. In the design context, the understanding of capacity analysis can assist highway designers in justifying the feasible alternative to be implemented. Traffic engineers normally utilize traffic models prediction to anticipate congestion and potential breakdown at critical areas. Through this approach, they are able to develop appropriate countermeasures and route diversion strategies as well as in developing traffic management strategies to solve the congestion on the expressway. Merging flow rates models were successfully developed and validated in these studies. They are needed in order to understand the merging operation at ramp junctions. The models are useful for estimating flow rates in lanes 1 and 2 immediately upstream of the merge influence area.
