MSc Thesis Proposal
Optimal off-ramp metering
Mentor: B.
De Schutter
Keywords: traffic control, optimization
Description:
One of the possible causes of traffic jams
on highways is that sometimes the traffic cannot
leave an off-ramp of the highway fast enough. The growing
waiting queue spills back
to the highway and causes a congestion there. An example of such a
situation can be found in Delft (see figure below) on
Saturdays, when the IKEA attracts a
lot of visitors. The visitors coming from the south (Rotterdam) want
to turn right after the off-ramp at intersection I, but there is a
conflicting stream of vehicles coming from Delft that enters the
highway via the on-ramp heading to the north
(The Hague). Currently, there is no traffic signal at this intersection and the
stream leaving Delft has the right of way. This limits
the flow leaving the off-ramp which sometimes results in a congestion
on the highway A13. Changing the geometry of the intersection by
giving the right of way to the off-ramp traffic is no option because at
the beginning of the peak-hours a lot of people want to leave Delft and
the waiting queue at the intersection could spill back to the street
network of the city, which is undesirable.
If the visitors of IKEA cannot leave the off-ramp fast
enough the congestion spills back to the highway A13. A
conflicting stream comes from the vehicles that want to leave
Delft in the direction of The Hague.
We want to prevent congestion spill-back to the highway by controlling
the traffic signals at intersection I.
The goal is to design an intelligent/adaptive/predictive traffic signal
control algorithm that optimizes the traffic flows on the intersection
and the highway (and thus prevents from blocking back both to the
highway and the Delft street network). The controller should change
the traffic signal settings as a function (of the prediction) of
the flows that want to cross the intersection.
If you are interested in selecting this project as your MSc project,
please come along or send us an email for more information.
This page is maintained by
Bart De Schutter.