Dynamic Robertson's Platoon Dispersion Model in Connected Vehicle Environment

The parameters of the traditional Robertson's platoon dispersion model are based on historical data, and thus, it cannot provide a good reflection of the dynamic characteristics of traffic flow. In order to solve this problem, a connected vehicle environment is considered, and the travel time of the vehicles is easily obtained. The relevant parameters of the Robertson's model can be estimated in real time based on this. Then, a dynamic Robertson's platoon dispersion model was proposed. Later, the relationship between the arrival flow rate of the downstream intersection and the departing flow rate of the upstream intersection was analysed using the proposed model with field collected data, and compared with those obtained using the traditional Robertson's model and actual data. The results show that the proposed model can better describe the law of dispersion in traffic flow, and the mean squared error of prediction is reduced by approximately 30.68%, compared with the traditional Robertson's model.