Distributed Coordination and Control for a Freeway Traffic Network Using Consensus Algorithms

Abstract

This paper presents the coordination and control for a freeway traffic network. Since a mismatch between the freeway capacity and the amount of traffic flow leads to freeway congestion, it is required to achieve the desired traffic density in the freeway traffic network. The traffic density of each cell is determined by the on-ramp flow and the main stream inflow. In addition, each cell has different on-ramp-flow constraints and main-stream-inflow constraints. Thus, it is required to coordinate the on-ramp flow and control the main stream inflow to achieve the desired traffic density for each cell. In this paper, a consensus-based coordination and control for a nonhomogeneous freeway traffic network is developed in a distributed manner. For the on-ramp-flow coordination and the main-stream-inflow control, consensus schemes only using local information are employed. Thus, this paper proposes a distributed on-ramp-flow coordination scheme and a main-stream-inflow control method considering constraints based on distributed consensus algorithms. Through numerical simulations, the effectiveness of the proposed approaches is illustrated.