On the effect of capacity drops in highways with service stations

This paper studies the capacity drops phenomena on a macroscopic, first-order model for freeway traffic. In particular, we focus on the effect that a Service Station (ST) has on the mainstream traffic evolution. We propose a modified formulation of the Cell Transmission Model with service station (CTM-s) that considers this important phenomenon, and use a micro-simulation based on Aimsun Next to identify the model parameters via a structured identification procedure. Finally, we validate the ability of the CTM-s with capacity drops to better describe the traffic evolution with respect to the classical formulation.