City-wide traffic control: modeling impacts of cordon queues

Optimal cordon-metering rates are obtained using Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams in combination with flow conservation laws. A model-predictive control algorithm is also used so that time-varying metering rates are generated based on their forecasted impacts. Our scalable algorithm can do this for an arbitrary number of cordoned neighborhoods within a city. Unlike its predecessors, the proposed model accounts for the constraining effects that cordon queues impose on a neighborhood's circulating traffic. It does so at every time step by approximating a neighborhood's street space occupied by cordon queues, and re-scaling the MFD downward to describe the state of circulating traffic that results. The model is also unique in that it differentiates between saturated and under-saturated cordon-metering operations. Computer simulations show that these enhancements can substantially improve the predictions of both, the trip completion rates in a neighborhood and the rates that vehicles cross metered cordons. Optimal metering policies generated as a result are similarly shown to do a better job in reducing the Vehicle Hours Traveled in a city. The VHT reductions stemming from the proposed model and from its predecessors differed by as much as 18%.