Estimating road traffic flows in macroscopic Markov model

Traffic flows gain more and more attention in transportation engineering. One possible means of understanding the traffic flow in a city is to gather sequences of traffic position data, called link flows, measured by vehicle-mounted sensors, which are increasingly available by various providers for municipalities. Link flows can be used for planning of operation and maintenance, and for forecasting of future traffic events. In this paper, we investigate how the microscopic Markov traffic model can be used to predict traffic congestion on the roads between different nodes or regions of a city. The proposed model is evaluated in a numerical study by using real traffic data recorded in the city of Porto. The results show that the model developed for simulation is of limited use for predicting the traffic between different areas of a city.