Arterial-Friendly Local Ramp Metering Control Strategy

Abstract

To prevent local streets being blocked by overflowing on-ramp queues, a standard practice of ramp metering control is to restrain its function when a series of preset conditions are identified by on-ramp queue detectors. Such a trade-off between potential ramp queue spillback and the restraint resulting from the operation of metering control may often fail to either effectively mitigate bottlenecks caused by on-ramp waving or convince arterial users and local traffic agencies of the need for ramp metering operations. This study, therefore, presents an arterial-friendly local ramp metering system (named AF-ramp) that can achieve the target metering rate to produce optimal freeway conditions without ramp queues spilling back onto local streets. This is achieved by concurrently optimizing the signal plans for those intersections that send turning flows to the ramp. At this stage, this system has been developed for time-of-day control. It could also serve as the base module for extending to real-time control, or multi-ramp coordinated operations. The AF-ramp model, with its ability to optimize the arterial signals concurrently with the ramp metering rate, can ensure the best use of the capacity of local intersections and prevent any gridlock caused by overflows from on-ramp queue spillback or arterial turning traffic. With extensive simulation experiments, the evaluation results confirmed the AF-ramp model’s effectiveness in improving traffic conditions on both the freeway and its neighboring arterial links at the same time. This study has also introduced the real-time extension of the proposed model and a framework of a transition from the time-of-day control to fully responsive real-time operations.