A Dynamic Competition Control Strategy for Freeway Merging Region Balancing Individual Behaviour and Traffic Efficiency

An integrated control strategy is considered in this paper with the aim of solving congestion in freeway merging regions during peak hours. Merging regions discussed in this paper include the mainline and on-ramp. Traditional research mainly focuses on the efficiency of traffic, ignoring the experience of on-ramp drivers and passengers. Accordingly, a dynamic competition control strategy is proposed to balance individual behaviour and traffic efficiency. First, the concept of the congestion index is introduced, which is expressed by the queue length and the speed parameter of the merging region. The congestion index is used to balance the priorities of the vehicles from the mainline and on-ramp into the merging region in order to avoid poor individual behaviour of on-ramp drivers due to the long-time waiting. Additionally, a nonlinear optimal control approach integrating variable speed limits control and ramp metering is proposed to minimize the total time spent and the maximum traffic flow. The integrated control approach proposed in this paper is tested by simulation which is calibrated using field data. The results indicate that the integrated control approach can effectively shorten the total delay and enhance the traffic service level.</p

Exploration of interactive classroom test method in universities based on the module thought

University is an important transit station for students to enter social life, undertaking the important mission of personnel training. Nowadays, a series of challenges exists in university education, such as the popularity of electronic information making students lack the ability to help each other. How to develop the mutual cooperation ability and active learning ability is an important topic in university education. This paper proposes an interactive classroom test method considering the learning characteristics of university students. The module thought is introduced to optimize the teaching system and help teachers to master classroom. In the interactive classroom test method, students can design the test paper based on the learning of course content and understanding. Then the different module group may use and review these test papers. The application and investigation of the proposed method are given by concrete practice. The results show that this method can enhance the spirit of teamwork and competition among students

CTM Based Real-Time Queue Length Estimation at Signalized Intersection

Queue length is an important index of the efficiency of urban transport system. The traditional approaches seem insufficient for the estimation of the queue length when the traffic state fluctuates greatly. In this paper, the problem is solved by introducing the Cell Transmission Model, a macroscopic traffic flow, to describe the vehicles aggregation and discharging process at a signalized intersection. To apply the model to urban traffic appropriately, some of its rules were improved accordingly. Besides, we can estimate the density of each cell of the road in a short time interval. We, first, identify the cell, where the tail of the queue is located. Then, we calculate the exact location of the rear of the queue. The models are evaluated by comparing the estimated maximum queue length and average queue length with the results of simulation calibrated by field data and testing of queue tail trajectories. The results show that the proposed model can estimate the maximum and average queue length, as well as the real-time queue length with satisfactory accuracy

Multiobjective Optimal Formulations for Bus Fleet Size of Public Transit under Headway-Based Holding Control

In recent years, with the development of advanced technologies for data collection, real-time bus control strategies have been implemented to improve the daily operation of transit systems, especially headway-based holding control which is a proven strategy to reduce bus bunching and improve service reliability for high-frequency bus routes, with the concept of regulating headways between successive buses. This hot topic has inspired the reconsideration of the traditional issue of fleet size optimization and the integrated bus holding control strategy. The traditional headway-based control method only focused on the regulation of bus headways, without considering the number of buses on the route. The number of buses is usually assumed as a given in advance and the task of the control method is to regulate the headways between successive buses. They did not consider the bus fleet size problem integrated with headway-based holding control method. Therefore, this work has presented a set of optimal control formulations to minimize the costs for the passengers and the bus company through calculating the optimal number of buses and the dynamic holding time, taking into account the randomness of passenger arrivals. A set of equations were formulated to obtain the operation of the buses with headway-based holding control or the schedule-based control method. The objective was to minimize the total cost for the passengers and the bus company in the system, and a Monte Carlo simulation based solution method was subsequently designed to solve the optimization model. The effects of this optimization method were tested under different operational settings. A comparison of the total costs was conducted between the headway-based holding control and the schedule-based holding control. It was found that the model was capable of reducing the costs of the bus company and passengers through utilizing headway-based bus holding control combined with optimization of the bus fleet size. The proposed optimization model could minimize the number of buses on the route for a guaranteed service level, alleviating the problem of redundant bus fleet sizes caused by bus bunching in the traditional schedule-based control method. Document type: Articl

Research on signalized intersection mixed traffic flow platoon control method considering Backward-looking effect

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) technology facilitates the advancement of intelligent transportation. However, intelligent control techniques for mixed traffic flow at signalized intersections involving both CAVs and Human-Driven Vehicles (HDVs) require further investigation into the impact of backward-looking effect. This paper proposes the concept of 1+n+1 mixed platoon considering the backward-looking effect, consisting of one leading CAV, n following HDVs, and one trailing CAV. The leading and trailing CAVs collectively guide the movement of intermediate HDVs at intersections, forming an optimal control framework for platoon-based CAVs at signalized intersections. Initially, a linearized dynamic model for the 1+n+1 mixed platoon is established and compared with a benchmark model focusing solely on controlling the lead vehicle. Subsequently, constraints are formulated for the optimal control framework, aiming to enhance overall intersection traffic efficiency and fuel economy by directly controlling the leading and trailing CAVs in the platoon. Finally, extensive numerical simulations compare vehicle throughput and fuel consumption at signalized intersections under different mixed platoon control methods, validating that considering both front and backward-looking effects in the mixed platoon control method outperforms traditional methods focusing solely on the lead CAV

Dosimetric Evaluation of a New Rotating Gamma System for Stereotactic Radiosurgery

Purpose: A novel rotating gamma stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) system (Galaxy RTi) with real-time image guidance technology has been developed for high-precision SRS and frameless fractionated stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT). This work investigated the dosimetric quality of Galaxy by comparing both the machine treatment parameters and plan dosimetry parameters with those of the widely used Leksell Gamma Knife (LGK) systems for SRS. Methods: The Galaxy RTi system uses 30 cobalt-60 sources on a rotating gantry to deliver non-coplanar, non-overlapping arcs simultaneously while the LGK 4C uses 201 static cobalt-60 sources to deliver noncoplanar beams. Ten brain cancer patients were unarchived from our clinical database, which were previously treated on the LGK 4C. The lesion volume for these cases varied from 0.1 cm3 to 15.4 cm3. Galaxy plans were generated using the Prowess TPS (Prowess, Concord, CA) with the same dose constraints and optimization parameters. Treatment quality metrics such as target coverage (%volume receiving the prescription dose), conformity index (CI), cone size, shots number, beam-on time were compared together with DVH curves and dose distributions. Results: Superior treatment plans were generated for the Galaxy system that met our clinical acceptance criteria. For the 10 patients investigated, the mean CI and dose coverage for Galaxy was 1.77 and 99.24 compared to 1.94 and 99.19 for LGK, respectively. The beam-on time for Galaxy was 17.42 minutes compared to 21.34 minutes for LGK (both assuming dose rates at the initial installation). The dose fall-off is much faster for Galaxy, compared with LGK. Conclusion: The Galaxy RTi system can provide dose distributions with similar quality to that of LGK with less beam-on time and faster dose fall-off. The system is also capable of real-time image guidance at treatment position to ensure accurate dose delivery for SRS.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Air pollution control or economic development? Empirical evidence from enterprises with production restrictions

Production restriction is an environmental regulation adopted in China to curb the air pollution of industrial enterprises. Frequent production restrictions may cause economic losses for enterprises and further hinder their green transformation. Polluting enterprises are faced with the dilemma of choosing environmental protection or economic development. Using panel data on industrial enterprises in China from 2016 to 2019, this paper evaluates the impact of production restrictions on both enterprises' environmental and economic performance with regression models. The results show that production restrictions significantly drop the concentrations of SO2 and NOx emitted from polluting enterprises. Meanwhile, production restrictions have significant negative effects on operating income, financial expenses, net profit, and environmental protection investment. The mechanism analysis reveals that production restrictions mitigate air pollutant concentrations by increasing the number of green patents and improving total factor productivity, which also verifies the Porter hypothesis. However, there is a masking mediating effect of environmental investment, which indicates that the reduction of environmental investment hinders the enterprise's efforts to control air pollution. In addition, heterogeneous analysis shows that the economic shock on microenterprises is larger than that on small enterprises. Implementing production restrictions for microenterprises may be a way to eliminate their backwards production capacity