Deriving environment-friendly speed limit scheme using an integrated traffic simulation framework

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traffic authorities have taken various measures to mitigate vehicular-source pollution emissions, among which setting speed limits has been proved to be effective. However, most of the existing macroscopic research proposes idealized mathematical models to design optimal speed limit from the perspective of network equilibrium, and the simplified pollution emission functions cannot accurately reflect the emission mechanism. In order to improve the accuracy of emission calculation and obtain more reliable speed limit schemes in a large-scale network, an integrated traffic simulation approach was proposed herein to derive environment-friendly road speed limit schemes. First, this article built an integrated simulation framework to portray traffic operations and emissions comprehensively. Subsequently, a toy network was employed to demonstrate how to obtain environment-friendly speed limit schemes using this framework. Then this article utilized it to determine the corresponding optimal speed limit schemes on the Second Ring road network in Beijing under different scenarios. The results indicated that traffic authorities should impose adaptive rather than fixed speed limits according to traffic period and emission reduction priority. Moreover, imposing the derived speed limit schemes, the amounts of total emissions, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, and fine particulate matter decreased by 2.24%, 0.72%, 0.13%, 1.61%, 2.32%, and 5.35% during peak hour, and by 8.31%, 0.60%, 1.92%, 7.16%, 8.60%, and 8.72% during off-peak hour, respectively. Implications: In order to alleviate traffic pollutions emission issues more effectively from the traffic management perspective, we put forward an integrated traffic simulation approach to derive the environmental friendly road speed limit schemes. We combined MOVES and PARAMICES to build the integrated traffic simulation framework to portray road traffic operations and emissions elaborately. To verify the effectiveness of our method on real large road network, we used this method to find out the corresponding optimal speed limit schemes within the combination scheme set on Second Ring road network in Beijing under different traffic demand scenarios. Comparing with the current speed limit scheme, our derived speed limit scheme contributed to lowering emission. The amounts of total pollution emissions, hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon dioxide (CO2), and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) decreased by 2.24%, 0.72%, 0.13%, 1.61%, 2.32%, and 5.35% during peak hours, and by 8.31%, 0.60%, 1.92%, 7.16%, 8.60%, and 8.72% during off-peak hours, respectively.