Urban congestion gating control based on reduced operational network fundamental diagrams

Summarization: Based on the recently proposed concept of an operational urban NFD (network fundamental diagram) and a feedback gating procedure, it is shown that simple, practicable and efficient gating control may be based on a strongly reduced amount of real-time measurements. The urban network of Chania, Greece, is used as a test-bed for the investigations within a realistic microscopic simulation environment. The results indicate that reduced NFDs, obtained with far less measurements than for a complete NFD, exhibit a critical range of traffic states that is virtually equivalent to its counterpart of the complete NFD; and that the provision of accordingly reduced amounts of real-time measurements for feeding the feedback regulator leads to virtually equivalent gating results as in the full measurement case. In the investigated example, feedback gating is demonstrated to lead to substantial improvements of travel delays, network throughput and travel time reliability.Presented on: Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologie