Integrated traffic flow and emission control based on FASTLANE and the multi-class VT-macro model

Reference:
S. Liu, B. De Schutter, and H. Hellendoorn, "Integrated traffic flow and emission control based on FASTLANE and the multi-class VT-macro model," Proceedings of the 2014 European Control Conference, Strasbourg, France, pp. 2908-2913, June 2014.

Abstract:
The main goal of this paper is to develop a multi-class traffic flow and emission model that is suited for on-line model-based control. Multi-class traffic flow and emission models take into account the heterogeneous nature of traffic networks. In comparison with single-class models, these models are more accurate. Using more accurate model results in better description of the traffic network. However, this also leads to lower a computation speed when the model is used for on-line model-based control. FASTLANE is a first-order multi-class traffic flow model that is faster than more accurate models (such as METANET). However, FASTLANE does not yet describe emission and fuel consumption. Therefore, we propose to integrate FASTLANE with the VT-macro emission model. This results in a combined FASTLANE and multi-class VT-macro model that describes multi-class traffic flows and emissions and that yields a balanced trade-off between the accuracy and the computation speed. On-line model predictive control is used to obtain a balanced optimization of the total time spent and the total emissions. A case study is implemented to validate the efficiency of the new integrated FASTLANE and multi-class VT-macro model. The simulation results indicate that considering the heterogeneous nature of multi-class traffic leads to a better control performance than single-class models.