Developing an area-wide system for coordinated ramp meter control.

Details

• Creators:
  Wang, Yinhai ; Perrine, Kenneth A. ; Lao, Yunteng
• Corporate Creators:
  Transportation Northwest Regional Center X (TransNow) (UTC)
• Corporate Contributors:
  University of Washington ; United States. Department of Transportation
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  Advanced Traffic Management Systems Freeway Management Systems Ramp Metering
• Publication/ Report Number:
  TNW2008-11
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  United States
• Edition:
  Final report; Dec. 2008
• Corporate Publisher:
  Transportation Northwest (TransNow) UTC
• Abstract:
  Ramp metering has been broadly accepted and deployed as an effective countermeasure
  
  against both recurrent and non-recurrent congestion on freeways. However, many current ramp
  
  metering algorithms tend to improve only freeway travels using local detectors’ inputs and
  
  overlook the negative impacts on local streets. This may generate two problems: 1) the optimal
  
  local settings may not result in a system-wide optimum in terms of traffic operations; and 2) the
  
  increased congestion on local streets due to on-ramp overflow may counteract the gains in
  
  freeway operations. To address these problems, we propose an area-wide ramp metering system
  
  to improve the coordination of ramp meters for system-wide optimization and on-ramp overflow
  
  minimization. Our experimental results show that our method can offer improved performance in
  
  ramp metering operations under tested scenarios and also reduce the likelihood of on-ramp
  
  overflow.
  
  This novel strategy for active ramp metering is inspired by the principles of a computer
  
  network congestion control strategy. In this strategy, certain types of congestion at a targeted
  
  freeway location can be significantly reduced by limiting on-ramp vehicle flows to a fraction of
  
  ramp demand and then additively increasing rates to avoid ramp queue spillover onto city streets.
  
  This approach can be actively used to immediately curb the growth of traffic congestion and
  
  therefore shorten travel delays. The effectiveness of this ramp metering approach has been
  
  evaluated by microscopic simulation experiments. Our experimental results show that our
  
  method can reduce system-wide travel delays in the tested scenarios by as much as 28.2% when
  
  compared with the Fuzzy Logic ramp metering algorithm, and also reduce the frequency and
  
  severity of on-ramp overflow. This indicates that this area-wide algorithm can provide benefit
  
  when applied to urban freeway corridors for congestion mitigation.
  
  
• Format:
  PDF
• Collection(s):
  University Transportation Centers US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:6f3bd0e9b860333337036f752aa9627ee68d3ce40663971bc2cde4745814ef9ac2b849dbd9c20cdf7b0764f9b575c6e7818c3d467687358686be98a19f3be818
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/17235/dot_17235_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 380.52 KB ]