Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 473847, 10 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/473847
Research Article

Travel Time Model of Left-Turning Vehicles at Signalized Intersection

Leng Jun-qiang,1,2 Feng Yu-qin,3 Zhai Jing,2 Bao Lei,2 and He Yi2

1School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150050, China
2School of Automobile Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai, China
3School of Automobile and Traffic Engineering, Heilongjiang Institute of Technology, Harbin 150050, China

Received 22 August 2011; Accepted 3 November 2011

Academic Editor: Anders Eriksson

Copyright © 2012 Leng Jun-qiang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The travel time of left-turning vehicles at signalized intersection was discussed. Under the assumption that the opposing through vehicles headway follows M3 distribution, the travel time model was established on the basis of gap theory and queue theory. Comparison was done with the common model based on the assumption that the opposing through vehicles headway follows negative exponential distribution. The results show that the model in this paper has stronger applicability and its most relative error is less than 15%. In addition, the sensitivity analysis was done. The results show that the opposing through flow rate has significant impact on travel time. The impact of left-turning flow rate and following headway is light when the opposing through flow rate is small, the threshold is about 0.18 veh/s. The model established in this paper can well calculate travel time of left-turning vehicles at intersection, and the methodology may provide reference to other occasions.