Investigation of ATDM Strategies to Reduce the Probability of Breakdown

Advanced Traffic and Demand Management (ATDM) strategies are increasingly being considered to reduce the probability and impacts of traffic flow breakdown. The goal of this project is to explore and assess methods to improve the operations at critical bottlenecks utilizing ramp metering and variable speed limit (VSL) algorithms that consider the probability of breakdown at recurrent bottleneck locations. The assessment of these ATDM strategies is based on microscopic simulation modeling. Existing simulation model calibration procedures and guidelines are first examined and enhancements are proposed in this study to account for the breakdown characteristics at bottleneck locations in the calibration process. Various modifications are proposed to the existing fuzzy logic ramp metering system with the consideration of the probability of breakdown. The impacts of these modifications are evaluated using the calibrated simulation model. The results indicate that the probability of breakdown modifications may be able to provide some limited operational improvement at specific bottlenecks and/or along the entire network. However, there is no clear pattern regarding when these improvements can be observed and how different traffic demand levels may affect the impact of these modifications. Using an activation threshold to turn on ramp meters seems to be a viable alternative to time of day operation. This would allow less operator involvement and allow the activation process to become demand sensitive. In addition, this study developed a shockwave-based VSL system which uses a heuristic switching logic based controller with specified thresholds of prevailing traffic flow condition locations. This VSL strategy aims to improve operations and mobility at critical bottlenecks. The performance of the proposed method was tested in simulation assuming that the data required by the method is collected first using traffic detectors and then using Connected Vehicles. The results show that the considered VSL strategy can considerably decrease the maximum back of queue and the duration of breakdown

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