LAUSR

Previous research has shown that proper metering of entry traffic to urban street networks, similar to metering traffic on on-ramps in freeway facilities, reduces traffic congestion, especially in oversaturated flow conditions. Building on the previous research, this paper presents a real-time and scalable methodology for finding near-optimal metering rates dynamically in urban street networks. The problem is formulated into a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) based on the cell transmission model. We propose a distributed optimization scheme that decomposes the network level MILP into several link-level MILPs to reduce the complexity of the problem. We convert the link-level MILPs to linear programs to reduce the computational complexity further. Moreover, we create distributed coordination between the link-level linear programs to push the solutions toward optimality. The distributed optimization and coordination solution algorithm is incorporated into a rolling horizon technique to account for the time-varying demand and capacity and to reduce the computational complexity further. We applied the proposed solution technique to a number of case studies and observed that it was scalable and real time and found solutions that were at most 2.2% different from the optimal solution of the problem. Like the previous studies, we found significant improvements in network operations as a result of traffic metering.