Distributed coordinated control of mixed expressway and urban roads: a sensitivity-based approach

The inherent interdependency between mixed expressway and urban road networks calls for an effective coordinated traffic control approach. This study introduces a sensitivity-based distributed method to coordinate ramp metering and traffic signal control. Firstly, the quantitative relationships between network nodes are established through a developed traffic flow model for mixed networks. The network-level sensitivity information is analyzed to assess the influence of controllers on the traffic state. Additionally, a dynamic subproblems decomposition algorithm is proposed, considering the network’s spatial structure and dynamic traffic characteristics. By employing community detection techniques, tightly connected controllers are clustered to enable efficient and adaptive distributed control. The optimization problem is then decomposed into several subproblems, each formulated as a bi-level programming problem within a model predictive control framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategy enhances the traffic efficiency of mixed networks with a 14.5% reduction in total travel time during peak hours, which shows better performance compared with the other three existing control strategies.