ABSTRACT
Little scientific work has been reported on the freeway work zone delay and queue length estimation problem specifically. Some research, however, has been done on queuing
theory models based on the demand-capacity dynamics of traffic flow on freeways with
special lanes such as car pool or priority vehicle lanes (Daganzo 1997; Daganzo et al. 1997) and breakdown of traffic flow behind bottlenecks on freeways due to entry and exit
ramps, uphill gradients, and lane closures (Newell 1998 & 1999; Cassidy and Bertini 1999; Son 1999). It has been shown that the type of bottleneck does not affect the traffic
flow characteristics (Treiber et al. 2000). Jiang (1999a) presents a deterministic model to
compute delay in work zones as a sum of deceleration delay at the start of a work zone, reduced speed delay, acceleration delay at the end of a work zone, queue delay for
congested traffic and waiting time delay for uncongested traffic. However, this model
assumes fixed values for vehicle velocity and acceleration, and does not take traffic flow characteristics into consideration.
