An integrated toll and ramp control methodology for dynamic freeway congestion management

This paper investigates an integrated freeway traffic management system, which coordinates both dynamic toll pricing and ramp control strategies for the purpose of dynamic freeway congestion management. The proposed integrated dynamic toll-ramp control methodology is built mainly on the principles of stochastic optimal control approaches, involving two developmental procedures. First, through detector configurations and system specification, a discrete-time nonlinear stochastic system is formulated to characterize the time-varying relationships of system states, control variables, and traffic data. Then, by employing the extended Kalman filtering technology, a stochastic optimal control based algorithm is proposed to execute the integrated dynamic toll and ramp control mechanism. With the aid of the Paramics microscopic traffic simulator, numerical studies under various simulated freeway congestion scenarios are conducted. Corresponding numerical results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology in response to diverse freeway traffic congestion phenomena, and its relative advantages in improving both the average travel time and hourly throughputs by 16.4% and 16.5%, respectively.