'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
This paper proposes a Logic-Based Traffic Flow
Control algorithm (LB-TFC) for integrated control of Ramp
Metering (RM) installations and Variable Speed Limits (VSLs)
in order to reduce traffic jams created at bottlenecks. LB-TFC
estimates, for each control time step, the number of vehicles that
should be held back or released by the control measures (i.e. the
VSLs and the RM rates) in order to avoid the capacity drop
(maximizing the outflow of the bottleneck). Afterwards, based
on the resulting estimated number of vehicles, the VSLs and/or
the RM rates are increased or decreased in a pre-specified order.
In order to avoid or reduce traffic breakdowns, the proposed
controller (LB-TFC) anticipates the future evolution of the
bottleneck density by using a feed-forward structure. As a
result, the performance of the controller is very efficient and
similar to the one obtained with an optimal controller while the
implementation of the controller (with an almost instantaneous
computation time) and the tuning of the parameters are easy.
In the second part of this work, published in a separate paper
(‘Part 2: Simulation and Comparison’), LB-TFC is simulated,
analyzed and compared for two freeways (one synthetic network
and one stretch of the ring-road freeway SE-30 in Seville, Spain