Bounded acceleration close to fixed and moving bottlenecks

The aim of this paper is to study how to represent bounded acceleration close to fixed and moving bottlenecks in the Lighthill, Whitham and Richards (LWR) framework. This generalizes the existing works on bounded acceleration which are devoted to homogeneous road sections. First an overview of the existing research is proposed, and then the specific problem of bottlenecks is examined. The concept ofa transition area upstream of the bottlenecks is proposed to precisely represent vehicle kinematics during the acceleration phase. The last part of the paper deals with the numerical resolution Of the bounded acceleration model close to bottlenecks and presents numerical examples for a fixed and a moving bottleneck. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.