Evaluation of Active Traffic Management (ATM) Strategies Under Recurring and Nonrecurring Congestion: an IH-35 Corridor Case Study

Active traffic management (ATM) strategies have been considered as a tool for congestion mitigation in the last few decades and have been used for managing recurring and non-recurring congestion. The performance of an ATM strategy depends on a number of factors, such as control logic, road network configuration, and demand level. While various studies report the effectiveness of different ATM strategies at various locations, relatively few of them evaluate their merits in a realistic yet controlled setup. Detailed microsimulation analysis is used to address this question. This article provides a case study which evaluates the performance of commonly used control algorithms on a 3.7-mile IH-35 corridor in Williamson County, Texas. Three ATM strategies are analyzed: ramp metering, variable speed limits, and dynamic lane use control. The authors also model the impacts of ATM strategies on parallel frontage roads and test the transferability of commonly used control algorithms under different cases of recurring and non-recurring congestion. The study confirms the usefulness of ramp metering, variable speed limits, and hard shoulder running in improving both corridor and network level performance under recurring congestion. The dynamic merge control strategy reduces ramp delay at the expense of higher corridor travel time. The authors' findings also indicate that the ALINEA algorithm, which shows 6.4% reduction in delay in the recurring congestion case, can possibly increase delay by 9-31% under certain scenarios of non-recurring congestion. Additionally, the location of the shoulder lane relative to the non-recurring congestion bottleneck is critical to the success of hard shoulder running.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB20 Standing Committee on Freeway Operations.
  • Authors:
    • Pandey, Venktesh
    • Li, Jia
    • Yahia, Cesar
    • Boyles, Stephen D
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2018

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 18p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01660979
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 18-06348
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Feb 22 2018 9:19AM