Melike Baykal-Gursoy. Modeling Interrupted Traffic Flow   

Abstract. A M/M/c queueing system under batch service interruptions is introduced to model the traffic flow on a roadway link subject to incidents. When a traffic incident happens, either all lanes or part of a lane is closed to the traffic.  As such, we model these interruptions either as complete service disruptions where none of the servers work or partial failures where servers work at a reduced service rate.  We analyze this system in steady state and present a scheme to obtain the stationary number of vehicles on a link. For those links with large c values, the closed-form solution of M/M/∞ queues under batch service interruptions can be used as an approximation. In addition to the incidents we also incorporated into the flow model the affect of recurrent congestion due to excess demand. We present simulation results that show the validity of the queueing models in the computation of average travel times.