Cell-Link Model for state forecasting of urban road traffic network

Traffic control and guidance is a key issue in intelligent transportation system, and it is based on accurate real time traffic state forecasting. CTM (Cell Transmission Model) can describe traffic flow behavior such as wave and queue. However, original CTM theory has difficulties in describing urban road traffic networks. To address this problem, a novel Cell-Link Model (CLM) is developed in this paper. The CLM establishes road traffic network modeling procedure and puts forward a series of steps to implement network abstraction. The present method is applied to state forecasting of a sample network, and simulation results show that, our method can obtain accurate predict results with high computational efficiency. Therefore, the present method can meet the demand of urban road traffic network state forecasting.