Incorporating Adaptive (Traffic Responsive) Ramp Metering in the Highway Capacity Manual Context

This paper presents a novel methodology for incorporating adaptive or traffic responsive ramp metering in the freeway analysis based on the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) 2010. Currently, the 2010 HCM only provides an option to meter on-ramps as a user input prior to the analysis in a 15 minute average flow rate basis using a planning level approach. As a result, the options for simulating and modeling any sophisticated ramp metering algorithm in the HCM context are limited. The freeway facilities methodology in the HCM plays a base role in travel time reliability and Active Traffic and Demand Management (ATDM) analysis, which are built upon a set of operational scenarios for a facility. Specifically, the HCM 2010 method typically generates a set of scenarios for reliability analysis. However, with the limitation of adaptive ramp metering incorporation, analysts are burdened with the task of manually entering average effective ramp metering rates for the entire set of scenarios for each ramp. Furthermore, the process can take a considerable amount of time in addition to creating a huge potential for inaccuracy and bias in estimating the freeways performance measures. This paper proposes necessary modifications to the HCM freeway facilities methodology to enable the use of any adaptive ramp metering including local and system wide algorithms. This is a crucial step toward incorporation of ramp metering as an ATDM strategy in the freeway analysis. At the end, a framework for using different adaptive ramp metering algorithms is proposed followed by a case study to confirm its precision and accuracy.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB40 Standing Committee on Highway Capacity and Quality of Service.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Aghdashi, Seyedbehzad
  • Khazraeian, Samaneh
  • Trask, Joseph Lake
  • Hadi, Mohammed
  • Rouphail, Nagui
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accuracy; Adaptive control; Algorithms; Case studies; Freeways; Methodology; Ramp metering
• Identifier Terms: Highway Capacity Manual
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01628803
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-05500
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 13 2017 9:12AM