C. Roncoli, N. Bekiaris-Liberis and M. Papageorgiou, "Lane-changing feedback control for efficient lane assignment at motorway bottlenecks," in 96th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), 2017.
We propose a feedback control strategy for lane assignment at bottleneck locations, assuming that a percentage of vehicles, equipped with Vehicle Automation and Communication Systems (VACS), are capable of receiving and executing specific lane-changing orders or recommendations. Starting from a previously proposed optimal control strategy, based on a simplified multi-lane motorway traffic flow model and formulated as a linear quadratic regulator, we design a feedback control problem aiming at maximising the throughput at bottleneck locations while distributing, according to a given policy, the total density at the bottleneck area among the different lanes, via optimal lane assignment of vehicles upstream of the bottleneck. The feedback control decisions are based on real-time measurements of the traffic state and inflow. The proposed strategy is tested on a nonlinear first-order macroscopic multi-lane traffic flow model, which also accounts for the capacity drop phenomenon.