A new platoon dispersion model and its application

Pacey's platoon dispersion model considered only the dispersion characteristics of the queuing vehicles during the red phase at the upstream intersection,which does not properly reflect the field situation.By assuming the speed following truncated normal distribution ranging from a minimum speed to free flow speed,a platoon dispersion model to study the dispersion characteristics of platoon at the upstream intersection was developed from the view point of traffic flow density.The platoon contains all the vehicles,not only the queuing vehicles during the red phase,but also the running cars which can pass a upstream intersection during the green phase.The model describes spread of cars along the downstream road to provide traffic data for signal timing plans of the downstream intersection as they move down from upstream intersection at red phase end time.Finally,numeric computation for coordination of successive signals is presented to illustrate the difference between the proposed model and Pacey's model.The results confirm the validity of the proposed model.