On 14 December 2016, TRAIL PhD student Kai Yuan will defend his PhD thesis “Capacity Drop on Freeways: traffic dynamics, theory and modeling” at Delft University of Technology. His defence is public, and you are invited to join.

Moreover, on the occasion of his public defence, TRAIL and TU Delft have set up a seminar on: ‘Mysteries on Motorway Traffic Operations: breakdowns and the capacity drop’.

In this masterclass, motorway traffic operations will be discussed. What are properties of the car-following behavior of drivers, how can their accelerations be described. An fascinating (yet very annoying for the drivers) property of traffic is that after congestion has set in, the capacity of the road decreases. From a drivers’ perspective, that means that drivers keep a larger distance from their leader after a lower speed (in the jam) than before the jam. This is called the capacity drop. This phenomenon leads to large delays. Moreover, it is the reason to try to avoid congestion at the motorway as long as possible, and hence is the main reason for management measures like ramp metering.

Slowly, science catches up with understanding and describing this phenomenon. This masterclass discusses the recent insights from the phenomenological side, as well as the practical side.

The masterclass includes an introduction to the topic, to make the master class accessible for all researchers and practitioners in the field of traffic operations and modelling.

Programme seminar
Chairman: Victor Knoop

12.45-13.15     Lunch
13.15-13.50     Dr. Henk Taale (TrafficQuest) ‘Empirical features of capacity’
13.50-14.25     Dr. Soyoung Ahn (University of Wisconsin – Madison) ‘A stochastic modeling of traffic breakdown for freeway merge bottlenecks’
14.25-14.45     Break
14.45-15.20     Dr. Jorge Laval (Georgia Tech) ‘Some additional features of the Geometric Brownian Motion car-following model’
15.20-15.55     Prof. Chris Tampère (University of Leuven) ‘Empirical observations of capacity drop on the Brussels ring road’
15.55               Drinks

Location: Orange room, TU Delft Library, Prometheusplein 1

Registration seminar: participation is free, registration is required: click here.

Public defence Kai Yuan
At 10:00 h the public defence starts in the Senaatszaal of the Aula. At 09.30 h Kay will give a brief presentation about his research in this same room (in English).