A lane-changing (LC) maneuver may cause the follower in the target lane (new follower) to decelerate and give up space, potentially affecting crash risk and traffic flow efficiency. In congested flow, a more aggressive LC maneuver occurs where the lane changer is partially next to the new follower and creates negative gaps, namely negative gap forced LC (NGFLC). Although NGFLC forms the foundation of sideswipe crashes, little has been done to address its impacts and the contributing factors. To tackle this issue, a total of 15,810 LC trajectory samples are extracted from three drone videos at different locations. These samples are categorized into NGFLC and normal LC groups for comparative analysis. Five commonly used conflict indicators are extended into two-dimensional to evaluate the crash risk of LC maneuver. The change of time gaps during LC maneuver are examined to quantify the impact of LC on traffic flow efficiency. We find that NGFLCs significantly increase crash risk, reflected by the number of hazardous LC events and potential crash areas compared to normal LC. Additionally, results reveal that both the lane changer and the new follower tend to maintain a larger time gap after NGFLCs. Factors including time headway, relative speed, and historical gaps in the target lane significantly affect NGFLC incidence. Once the movement of the leader in the original lane is taken into account, the prediction accuracy improves from 81% to 91%. The transferability tests indicate that the findings about the negative impact of NGFLC and the accuracy of its prediction model are consistent across different locations. These findings hold implications for driving assistance systems to better predict and mitigate NGFLCs.

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) models of variable speed limit (VSL) control systems (and traffic control systems in general) cannot be trained in real traffic process because new control actions are usually explored randomly, which may result in high costs (delays) due to exploration and learning. For this reason, existing RL-based VSL control approaches need a traffic simulator for training. However, the performance of those approaches are dependent on the accuracy of the simulators. This paper proposes a new RL-based VSL control approach to overcome the aforementioned problems. The proposed VSL control approach is designed to improve traffic efficiency by using VSLs against freeway jam waves. It applies an iterative training framework, where the optimal control policy is updated by exploring new control actions both online and offline in each iteration. The explored control actions are evaluated in real traffic process, thus it avoids that the RL model learns only from a traffic simulator. The proposed VSL control approach is tested using a macroscopic traffic simulation model to represent real world traffic flow dynamics. By comparing with existing VSL control approaches, the proposed approach is demonstrated to have advantages in the following two aspects: (i) it alleviates the impact of model mismatch, which occurs in both model-based VSL control approaches and existing RL-based VSL control approaches, via replacing knowledge from the models by knowledge from the real process, and (ii) it significantly reduces the exploration and learning costs compared to existing RL-based VSL control approaches.

Variable speed limits (VSLs) are a common traffic control measure to resolve freeway jam waves. State-of-the-art model predictive control (MPC) approaches of VSLs are developed based on Eulerian Lighthill-Whitham and Richards (LWR) models, where the decision variables are flows between road segments. It is difficult to implement constraints on speeds that are necessary in typical real-world speed limit systems, because converting flow to speed results in nonlinear and non-convex optimization formulations. In this paper, we develop a new MPC of VSLs based on a discrete Lagrangian LWR model, in which the decision variables are average speeds of vehicle groups. This allows formulating speed constraints as control constraints rather than state constraints in the MPC problem. The optimization of vehicle groups speeds is formulated as a linear programming problem which can be solved efficiently. We further integrate the presented MPC to a hierarchical VSL control framework leveraging connected vehicles. The presented MPC decides the optimal target speed of each vehicle group led by a connected automated vehicle (CAV) at the upper macroscopic level with a prediction horizon of 20 min. At the lower microscopic level, CAVs randomly distributed in mixed traffic are regarded as actuators of the upper layer. Microscopic CAV accelerations are optimized in a short horizon of the order 5–10 s so that the human-driven vehicles following them reach the target speed from the upper layer in an efficient and smooth manner. The presented MPC and the hierarchical control approach are tested in microscopic simulation environments. Simulation results show that (i) the presented MPC resolves freeway jam waves efficiently with reasonable safety constraints implemented, and (ii) the presented hierarchical control approach can effectively resolve jam waves in a single-lane freeway, even though the penetration rate of CAVs is as low as 5%.

This paper develops a model-based hierarchical control method for coordinated ramp metering on freeway networks with multiple bottlenecks and on- and off-ramps. The controller consists of two levels where at the upper level, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach is developed to optimize total network travel time by manipulating total inflow from on-ramps to the freeway network. The lower level controller distributes the optimal total inflows to each on-ramp of the freeway based on local traffic state feedback. The control method is based on a parsimonious aggregated traffic model that relates the freeway total outflow to the number of vehicles on the freeway sections. Studies on aggregated traffic modeling of networks have shown the existence of a well-defined and low-scatter Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) for urban networks. The MFD links network aggregated flow and density (accumulation). However, the MFD of freeway networks typically exhibits high scatter and hysteresis loops that challenge the control performance of MFD-based controllers for freeways. This paper addresses these challenges by modelling the effect of density heterogeneity along the freeway and capacity drop on characteristics of freeway MFD using field traffic data. In addition, we introduce a model to predict the evolution of density heterogeneity that is essential to reproduce the dynamics of freeway MFD accurately. The proposed model is integrated as the prediction model of the MPC in the hierarchical control method. The proposed coordinated ramp metering method shows desirable performance to reduce the vehicles total time spent and eliminate congestion. The control approach is compared with other coordinated ramp metering controllers based on the MPC framework with different traffic prediction models (e.g. CTM and METANET). The outcomes of numerical experiments highlight that the MFD-based hierarchical controller (i) is better able to overcome the modeling mismatch between the prediction model and the plant (process model) in the MPC framework and (ii) requires less computation effort than other nonlinear controllers.