AN INTEGRATED CONTROL APPROACH FOR TRAFFIC CORRIDORS

Abstract

The paper presents a unified approach to the design of integrated control strategies for traffic corridors of arbitrary topology including both motorways and signal controlled urban roads. The presented approach is based on suitable application of the store-and-forward modeling philosophy that leads to the formulation of a linear optimal control problem involving a number of possible control actions, such as ramp metering, signal control, motorway to motorway control, route guidance, and VMS control. The control objective is minimisation of a common criterion, such as the total delay or the total time spent in the network. The formulated optimal control problem may be resolved in real time using suitable algorithms to provide traffic responsive queue management particularly under saturated traffic conditions. The presentation of numerical results and case studies is to follow in subsequent publications.