Dynamic Lane Assignment Approach for Freeway Weaving Segment Operation

This paper proposes a dynamic lane assignment (DLA) approach for one-sided freeway weaving segments. The approach divides the weaving segment into weaving lanes and nonweaving lanes to reduce the disturbance between weaving and nonweaving traffic streams. The proposed DLA strategy is optimized by nonlinear integer programming under various on-ramp traffic volumes and weaving volume ratios. The applicability of DLA is tested with numerical experiments under different weave types, traffic flow rates, weaving volume ratios, and segment lengths. A VISSIM microsimulation model was developed and used to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy. Test results drawn from the numerical experiments and simulation indicate that the proposed DLA approach is applicable when the main-line weaving volume ratio is relatively low and it can increase the capacity and decrease the traffic delay for the weaving and upstream segments.