Development and Evaluation of a Control System for Regional Traffic Management.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Civil Engineering Volume 2011, Article ID 724897, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2011/724897 Research Article Development and Evaluation of a Control System for Regional Traffic Management John L. McLin1 and William T. Scherer2 1 MITRE Corporation, F063—Airspace and Airport Analysis, McLean, VA 22102, USA 2 Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA Correspondence should be addressed to John L. McLin, jlm3xy@ Received 24 October 2010; Accepted 12 February 2011 Academic Editor: Ram M. Pendyala Copyright © 2011 J. L. McLin and W. T. Scherer. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Traffic congestion is a worsening problem in metropolitan areas which will require integrated regional traffic control systems to improve traffic conditions. This paper presents a regional traffic control system which can detect incident conditions and provide integrated traffic management during nonrecurrent congestion events. The system combines advanced artificial intelligence techniques with a traffic performance model based on HCM equations. Preliminary evaluation of the control system using traffic microsimulation demonstrates that it has the potential to improve system conditions during traffic incidents. In addition, several enhancements were identified which will make the system more robust in a real traffic control setting. An assessment of the control system elements indicates that there are no substantial technical barriers in implementing this system in a large traffic network. 1. Introduction