Balancing Delays and Relative Queues at the Urban Network Periphery under Perimeter Control

Perimeter traffic flow control based on the macroscopic or network fundamental diagram provides the opportunity of operating an urban traffic network at its capacity. Because perimeter control operates on the basis of restricting inflow via reduced green times at selected entry (gated) links, vehicles on those links may be subject to queuing and delay. The gating of inflows and corresponding green times at the gated links may be decided so as to manage queue lengths or delays. Managing queue lengths may reduce the interference with upstream traffic whereas the management of delays may improve users’ perception with respect to fairness. In this paper the authors propose a strategy for delay balancing at the gated links under perimeter control. The strategy is evaluated in microscopic simulation for a realistic traffic network and compared with fixed-time only, perimeter control without queue or delay management and perimeter control with relative queue balancing. It has been found that managing the queues at the gated links not only improves the overall network performance but also reduces the possibility of queue propagation to the upstream junctions. This improves traffic flow outside the protected network. In addition, the results indicate that perimeter control with delay balancing has a similar performance as the case without queue or delay management being a suitable approach for flow distribution among the gated links. Compared to perimeter control only scenario, the gap between the ordered flow by the controller and the actual flow crossing the stop-line at the gated links reduced remarkably.

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

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Keyvan-Ekbatani, Mehdi
  • Carlson, Rodrigo C
  • Knoop, Victor L
  • Papageorgiou, Markos
• 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;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Highway traffic control; Network links; Traffic delays; Traffic flow; Traffic queuing; Traffic simulation; Urban highways
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01628780
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-05029
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 13 2017 9:12AM