A link traffic model by incorporating both merits of vertical and Horizontal Queue Concept

With the development of traffic flow theory and practice, traffic models at different levels of analysis are expected to provide comprehensive outputs with satisfactory efficiency. Accordingly, this research proposes an Equivalent Link traffic State Model (ELSM) to meet this requirement. ELSM combines both advantages of Vertical Queue Model (VQ) and Horizontal Queue Model (HQ). On one hand, the structure of ELSM is similar to VQ; on the other hand, queue dynamics at any moment along the link can be available through deriving three "characteristic points" of each cycle based on shock wave theory. Thus spatial variation of vehicle queue can be obtained. As a result, common traffic performance indexes such as delay, stops and queue length can be directly obtained in addition to the microscopic level variables such as vehicle trajectories and travel time. It is shown that with the increasing of numerical resolution, the results of CTM (Cell Transmission Model) gradually converge to ELSM.