Estimation of Traffic Demand at Freeway Work Zones

An iterative process, combining a macroscopic simulator and a set of the traffic demand-change estimation models, is developed to estimate the traffic demand at work zones in urban freeway corridors. The process is designed to capture the interaction between work-zone conditions and traffic diversion in determining the traffic demand approaching the entrance and exit ramps at a given work zone. The proposed models and process were calibrated and tested with the field data from the work zones in the Minnesota metro-freeway network. The test results indicate promising possibilities of the proposed process in terms of the estimation accuracy and transferability of the demand-change estimation models developed in this study.