Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 disrupted our everyday life. Many local authorities enforced a cordon sanitaire for the protection of sensitive areas. Travellers can only pass the cordon after tested. This paper aims to propose a method to design an on-ramp control scheme to maximise urban freeway network throughput with a predetermined queuing delay constraint at all off-ramps around cordon sanitaire. A bi-level programming model is formulated where the lower-level is a transportation system equilibrium to predict traffic flow, and the upper-level is onramp metering optimisation that is nonlinear programming. A stochastic queuing model is used to represent the waiting phenomenon at each off-ramp where testing is conducted, and a heuristic algorithm is designed to solve the proposed bi-level model where a method of successive averages (MSA) is adopted for the lower-level model; A genetic algorithm (GA) with elite strategy is adopted for the upper-level model. An experimental study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and algorithm. The results show that the methods can find a good heuristic optimal solution. These methods are useful for freeway operators to determine the optimal on-ramp control for disease control and prevention.
Highlights
The COVID‐19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic of a novel coronavirus disease (WHO)
This paper aims to propose a method and an algorithm to design an on-ramp control scheme at an urban freeway net‐ work while ensuring a tolerable waiting time at off-ramps around the cordon sanitaire
This paper proposed a method to determine the optimal on-ramp metering rates for maximum net‐ work throughput with a predetermined queuing de‐ lay constraint at off-ramps around cordon sanitaire
Summary
The COVID‐19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic of a novel coronavirus disease (WHO). The outbreak was first reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. As of 20 October 2020, more than 40.4 million cases of COVID‐19 have been reported across 188 countries and territories, resulting in more than 1.1 million deaths. The virus is primar‐ ily spread between people during close contact, most often via small droplets produced by cough‐ ing, sneezing, and talking. Cough, fatigue, shortness of breath, and loss of sense of smell. Recommended pre‐ ventive measures include hand washing, covering one's mouth when coughing, maintaining social distance from other people, wearing a face mask in public settings, disinfecting surfaces, increasing ventilation and air filtration indoors, and monitor‐ ing and self-isolation for people who suspect they are infected
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