Reduced Fuel Consumption and Travel Time in Transportation Networks

Project Details
STATUS

Completed

START DATE

04/01/15

END DATE

04/30/18

RESEARCH CENTERS InTrans
SPONSORS

Iowa State University
Midwest Transportation Center
USDOT/OST-R

Researchers
Principal Investigator
Ran Dai
Co-Principal Investigator
Jing Dong-O'Brien

Transportation Engineer, CTRE

Co-Principal Investigator
Anuj Sharma

Co-Director, REACTOR

About the research

Current technology in traffic control is limited to a centralized approach that has not paid appropriate attention to efficiency of fuel consumption and is subject to the scale of transportation networks. This project proposes a transformative approach to the development of a distributed framework to reduce the balanced fuel consumption and travel time through hybrid control on speed limit and ramp metering rates. It proposes to integrate the roadway infrastructures equipped with sensing, communication, and parallel computation functionalities in the new traffic control paradigm.

The research approach builds on three essential objectives that will jointly lead to a solid theoretical and experimental project to establish energy-efficient traffic control methodology:

  • Implementation of distributed control framework in large scale transportation networks
  • Simulation of dynamic traffic flow and performance tracking under implemented control signals using real traffic and vehicle data
  • Data analysis and sustained strategy improvement

Going beyond the existing distributed architectures where precise dynamic flow models and fuel consumptions have not been considered, the work generated traffic control strategies to realize real-time, macroscopic-level traffic regulation with high precision.

Simulation results demonstrated reduced fuel consumption and alleviated traffic congestion. The feasibility of the proposed optimization method was verified through Vissim simulation that considered different traffic volumes and random seed parameters.

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