Dynamic traffic shockwave speed estimation in connected vehicle environment

Traffic state estimation is important for active traffic planning, management, and control. By utilizing traffic status over time and space, a key theoretical analysis tool, i.e., shockwave theory, can be adopted as efficient tools to solve bottleneck or congestion problems. Two methods, who are fixed point observations and mobile probe vehicle observations, are typical methods and popular in traffic analytical agencies and projects. But both of them has their problems and new insights are needed for current proactive and online traffic implementations. In this paper, a dynamic traffic shockwave estimation method with both high temporal resolution and high spatial resolution is proposed based on integrating vehicle detecting system data from fixed loop detectors and trajectory data from probe vehicles in a connected vehicle environment. The proposed method was validated in a prevailing dataset. Results showed that the proposed method combined the advantages of mobile and fixed data. As a result, the proposed method is effective in improving the spatial and temporal resolution of the shockwave estimation in the considered general scenario.