Cooperative Systems Based Control for Integrating Ramp Metering and Variable Speed Limits

Traffic congestion leads to significant economic and environmental costs. Currently, for congestion reduction typically roadside detectors and actuators are used, such as inductive loops, ramp metering installations and variable message signs. However, more and more in-vehicle technologies are becoming available which have the potential of complementing or replacing roadside systems. Therefore, in the future, it is expected that congestion can be reduced by controlling individual vehicles using cooperative systems based control strategies. In this paper a cooperative systems based control strategy to resolve a moving jam near a metered on-ramp is developed. This strategy determines which vehicles should be slowed down by speed limits to resolve a moving jam. Additionally, the speed of the vehicles is also limited temporarily to realize a stable traffic flow during and shortly after the moving jam resolution. This is a cooperative control in the sense that traffic state detection, control action calculation and the control signal actuation are partly executed on the roadside and partly in the vehicles. The theory is developed for the ideal case of 100% penetration rate. The control strategy is evaluated using a microscopic traffic flow simulator. The most important findings of this research are that (1) a moving jam near a metered on-ramp can be resolved, thus resulting in an improvement of the throughput, and that (2) the best throughput improvement is achieved when choosing a ramp metering rate which is as low as possible.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • van de Weg, Goof
  • Hegyi, Andreas
  • Hellendoorn, Hans
  • Shladover, Steven E
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Adaptive control; Algorithms; Bottlenecks; Mobile communication systems; Ramp metering; Variable speed limits
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning; I73: Traffic Control;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01517587
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-1432
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 10 2014 9:24AM