M. Kontorinaki, A. Spiliopoulou, C. Roncoli, M. Papageorgiou, "Capacity drop in first-order traffic flow models: Overview and real-data validation", in Proceedings of the 95th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), Washington D.C., USA, 10-14 January 2016, pp. 16-3541.
First-order traffic flow models are known for their simplicity and computational efficiency and have, for this reason, been widely used for various traffic engineering tasks. However, first-order models are not able to reproduce significant traffic phenomena of great interest such as the capacity-drop and stop-and-go waves. This paper presents an overview of the, so far, proposed modelling approaches which aim to introduce the capacity-drop phenomenon into first-order traffic flow models. The background and main characteristics of each approach are analyzed with a particular emphasis on the practical applicability of such models for traffic management and control. The presented modelling approaches are calibrated and tested using real data from a motorway network in U.K.