Modified Traffic Flow Model with Connected Vehicle Microscopic Data for Proactive Variable Speed Limit Control

Abstract

Most previous prediction based Variable Speed Limit (VSL) control strategies focused on improving traffic mobility based on the macroscopic traffic data. Nowadays, the emerging technologies provide access to the microscopic traffic flow data, which better captures the details of traffic flow dynamics in the VSL controlled environment. Thus, in this paper, the microscopic traffic flow data were utilized as a supplement to predict the evolutions of traffic flow parameters. The proposed VSL control algorithm adopts the Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, which employs a modified version of the classic traffic flow model METANET to take advantage of the microscopic data in traffic flow predictions. The microscopic traffic simulation software VISSIM was used to establish an experimental simulation platform and perform real time traffic responsive control based on field data. The proposed control strategy was evaluated against the no-VSL control and macroscopic-based VSL controlled scenario. The results show that utilizing the proposed modified METANET model reduced the error in speed prediction accuracy and improved system mobility performance.