Citation

Pooladsanj M, Savla K, Ioannou PA. Transp. Res. C Emerg. Technol. 2023; 154: e104267.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.trc.2023.104267

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Ramp Metering (RM) is one of the most effective control techniques to alleviate freeway congestion. We consider RM at the microscopic level subject to vehicle following safety constraints for a freeway with arbitrary number of on- and off-ramps. The arrival times of vehicles to the on-ramps, as well as their destinations are modeled by exogenous stochastic processes. Once a vehicle is released from an on-ramp, it accelerates towards the free flow speed if it is not obstructed by another vehicle; once it gets close to another vehicle, it adopts a safe gap vehicle following behavior. The vehicle exits the freeway once it reaches its destination off-ramp. We design traffic-responsive RM policies that maximize the throughput. For a given routing matrix, the throughput of a RM policy is characterized by the set of on-ramp arrival rates for which the queue sizes at all the on-ramps remain bounded in expectation. The proposed RM policies operate under vehicle following safety constraints, where new vehicles are released only if there is sufficient gap between vehicles on the mainline at the moment of release. Furthermore, the proposed policies work in synchronous cycles during which an on-ramp does not release more vehicles than the number of vehicles waiting in its queue at the start of the cycle. All the proposed policies are reactive, meaning that they only require real-time traffic measurements without the need for demand prediction. However, they differ in how they use the traffic measurements. In particular, we provide three different mechanisms under which each on-ramp either: (i) pauses release for a time interval before the next cycle begins, or (ii) adjusts the release rate during a cycle, or (iii) adopts a conservative safe gap criterion for release during a cycle. The throughput of the proposed policies is characterized by studying stochastic stability of the induced Markov chains, and is proven to be maximized when the merging speed at all the on-ramps equals the free flow speed. Simulations are provided to illustrate the performance of our policies and compare with a well-known RM policy from the literature which relies on local traffic measurements.

Language: en

Keywords

Bounded queues; Connected vehicles; Markov chains; Ramp metering; Throughput; Traffic control; Traffic responsive