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Mitigating Recurrent Congestion via Particle Swarm Optimization Variable Speed Limit Controllers

  • Transportation Engineering
  • Technical Note
  • Published:
KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering Aims and scope

Abstract

Variable speed limit (VSL) has proven to be an efficient motorway control measure to mitigate traffic congestion at motorway bottlenecks. VSL can reduce the effect of shockwave on traffic conditions through smoothing the transition between the congested downstream and upstream traffic flows. In this paper, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based VSL method is proposed to minimize the probability of flow breakdown at bottleneck sections and ensure a maximum utilization of the current motorway infrastructure. The results show that the motorway system equipped with PSO based VSL outperformed the one with rule based VSL.

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Acknowledgements

This study was sponsored by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (Project No. 2017M620434), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Shaanxi Province Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (Project No. 2017BSHEDZZ38), Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (Project No. 2017JQ5033), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Project No. 300102218309, 300102218401, No. 300102218404).

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Correspondence to Duo Li.

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Li, D., Ranjitkar, P. & Zhao, Y. Mitigating Recurrent Congestion via Particle Swarm Optimization Variable Speed Limit Controllers. KSCE J Civ Eng 23, 3174–3179 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12205-019-0833-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12205-019-0833-4

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