Preventing Freeway Capacity Drop via MTFC and Ramp Metering

Capacity drop at congested freeway bottlenecks is well known with a lot of field observations and accounts for severe performance degradation of road infrastructure. This paper addresses freeway ramp metering and mainstream traffic flow control (MTFC) at active bottlenecks, with an aim of avoiding capacity drop. A special attention was paid to the effects of capacity drop on the performance of control measures. Via mathematical analyses, it was first shown that the significance and usefulness of the control measures are justified by the presence of capacity drop in field. This was then verified via macroscopic simulation studies, with ramp metering, MTFC, and their integration formulated in a framework of coordinated and integrated optimal control. It was also demonstrated that an appropriate usage of the control measures can effectively prevent the activation of potential bottlenecks on freeways and hence avoid capacity drop there.

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