A Data-Driven Control Design Approach for Freeway Traffic Ramp Metering with Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning

Shangtai Jin,Ronghu Chi,Jiangen Hao,Zhongsheng Hou

doi:10.1155/2014/936531

Abstract

ALINEA is a simple, efficient, and easily implemented ramp metering strategy. Virtual reference feedback tuning (VRFT) is most suitable for many practical systems since it is a “one-shot” data-driven control design methodology. This paper presents an application of VRFT to a ramp metering problem of freeway traffic system. When there is not enough prior knowledge of the controlled system to select a proper parameter of ALINEA, the VRFT approach is used to optimize the ALINEA's parameter by only using a batch of input and output data collected from the freeway traffic system. The extensive simulations are built on both the macroscopic MATLAB platform and the microscopic PARAMICS platform to show the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed data-driven controller tuning approach.

Highlights

Freeway traffic control has become an important area in the field of traffic engineering and intelligent transportation systems due to the rapid expansion in worldwide development of freeway infrastructure and traffic demand
This paper presents an application of Virtual reference feedback tuning (VRFT) to a ramp metering problem of freeway traffic system
The main feature of VRFT is that the method aims at minimizing a cost function by using a batch of input and output data collected from the controlled plant

Summary

Introduction

Freeway traffic control has become an important area in the field of traffic engineering and intelligent transportation systems due to the rapid expansion in worldwide development of freeway infrastructure and traffic demand. Note that ALINEA—a simple, efficient, and implemented ramp metering strategy—is a typical PI-type feedback regulator based on mainstream measurements of occupancy downstream of the ramp [28, 29]. It is a data-driven control strategy in nature without including any modeling information of the freeway system, but only depending on the input and output measurements. VRFT method is applied to optimize the parameter of the ALINEA controller in the presence of the modeling uncertainties and exogenous disturbances, as an alternative to the difficult task of fine-tuning ALINEA in realworld testing.

Problem Formulation

Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning for ALINEA Controller

Illustrative Examples

Performance Evaluation with MATLAB Platform

12 Zone 1

Conclusion