Coordinated Ramp Metering and Intersection Signal Control

Abstract

The operations of freeway ramp metering and urban traffic network signal control are independent in most areas. Such situation may cause some conflict between traffic streams of the two subsystems, or, at least, their dynamic interactions have not been taken into account from an overall system viewpoint. Traffic performance can be improved if the controls of these two subnetworks are integrated. This paper proposes a novel signal control strategy for the feeding intersection and a coordination strategy for integrating it with the corresponding freeway onramp metering. UP ALINEA with queue-overwrite is used for the ramp metering. A signal optimization, which takes into account the available ramp space and traffic demand, is developed for intersection signal control. A calibrated micro-simulation is used to compare the proposed control/coordination strategies and current control plans in the field. Simulation result shows that, even though the overall system performance only gets a marginal improvement, intersection delay reduces significantly.