A Traffic Model with Junction Constraints for Smart Cities Development

Good environmental quality is the foundation for a good quality of life. Technologies of Smart Cities can adequately support the path of sustainability in urban areas and thus compete to raise the quality of life of citizens. In particular, sustainable urban development concept can be characterized in terms of CO2 emissions. In order to address sustainable urban development, management and modeling traffic jam is a primary issue. We propose a mathematical model based on hyperbolic scalar conservation laws with non-local point constraint at the interface and a finite volume scheme to reproduce the capacity drop phenomenon at a road merge. We call capacity drop the situation in which the outflow through the junction is lower than the receiving capacity of the outgoing road, as too many vehicles trying to access the junction from the incoming roads hinder each other. The capability of representing such phenomenon by means of a non-local model allow us to obtain more accurate and detailed information by traffic data provided by sensors which can be used to propose a strategy to manage traffic flow near crossroads and to reduce the congestion in urban setting.