Intelligent Transport System Based Freeway Management and Control

The Intelligent Transport System (ITS) integrates telecommunications, electronics and information technologies with transport engineering in order to plan, design, operate, maintain and manage transport systems. As Bluetooth and navigation devices are widely used on latest produced vehicles, vehicle infrastructure integration (VII) system in ITS has been given flourishing expectation because of its detection accuracy and multiple-information transmitting capability. Ramp metering （RM）is an important control method for freeways in ITS which regulates the flows of freeway entrance ramps. This thesis firstly introduces RM system by presenting a simulation-based investigation in applying Coordinated Ramp Metering (CRM) and Variable Speed Limit (VSL) control on the managed freeway which leverages a macroscopic discrete-time traffic flow model (METANET) in a model-predictive schedule. To minimize the capacity drop at the on-ramp merging area, the on-ramp merging model is modified. The case study observation enhance the comprehension of how CRM and VSL work individually and cooperatively.The thesis then introduces VII system by developing a simulation framework which integrates traffic simulator Paramics and radio communication simulator OMNeT++. Experiments are performed to characterize wireless communication phenomena in VII system which come up with the optimized setting of VII system.In addition, an innovative theory and an algorithm of coordinated ramp metering are proposed which integrates vehicle routing information with coordinated ramp metering by collecting and processing the vehicles’ average trip length along the freeway. Comparison between new coordinated ramp metering algorithm and traditional ramp metering strategies (ALINEA and HERO) has been made and travel time saving is observed in new ramp metering algorithm. Last but not the least, to study the effectiveness of RM schemes in realistic VII system environment, multiple roadside receivers are set up in a big freeway network. Traditional loop detector system and VII system are compared in data analysis. The physical limitation of VII system is unveiled during the experiments and a combination of VII system and traditional loop detector system is proposed to compensate the limitation of VII system.To summarize, this thesis proposed a novel RM algorithm which incorporates vehicle’s routing information under VII system environment