An informational quantification by entropy for spatial road traffic flow

The authors have developed a new method using entropy to quantify the spatial distribution pattern of vehicles in order to evaluate spatial road traffic flow. It is similar to the way human beings perceive the informational image from traffic flow, and judge the existing state of the traffic macroscopically. Since the momentary space-mean-speed is defined as a function of traffic density and entropy of the traffic pattern, it is possible to convert a momentary image into quantified real-time information useful for traffic control. The authors discuss this theory, and illustrate the principle in actual traffic flow.