This paper shows how to reduce the bullwhip effect by introducing advance demand information (ADI) into the ordering schemes of supply chains. It quantifies the potential costs and benefits of ADI, and demonstrates that they are not evenly distributed across the chain. Therefore, market-based...

We characterize the impact of biofuel industry development on farmland use competition, referred to as the food-energy-environment trilemma: to grow food or energy crops, or to reserve the land for environmental conservation. We develop an analytical game-theoretic model to analyze the role and...

Traffic data from a 4-mile long congested rural road in Orinda, California, are used to show that traffic delays and vehicle accumulations between any two generic observers located inside a road section can be predicted from the traffic counts measured at the extremes of the section. The traffic...

Observations of freeway traffic flow are usually quite scattered about an underlying curve when plotted versus density or occupancy. Although increasing the sampling intervals can reduce the scatter, whenever an experiment encompasses a rush hour with transitions in and out of congestion, some...

The arrival times of vehicles traveling southbound along a two-lane, bi-directional highway were recorded at eight neighboring locations upstream of a bottleneck caused by an oversaturated traffic signal. Cumulative curves constructed from these observations describe completely and in great...

This report describes field observations of multi-lane freeway traffic upstream of an oversaturated off-ramp. It is based on empirical evidence from freeway I-880 (northbound) near Oakland, California. The report presents two diagnostic tools that reveal hidden features of the traffic stream...

This report is part of PATH Task Order 4141 and shows how moving obstructions can be modeled numerically with kinematic wave theory. It shows that if a moving obstruction is replaced by a sequence of fixed obstructions at nearby locations with the same "capacity", then the error in vehicle...

This paper shows how the evolution of multicommodity traffic flows over complex networks can be predicted over time, based on a simple macroscopic computer representation of traffic flow that is consistent with the kinematic wave theory under all traffic conditions. After a brief review of the...