Freeway traffic systems: prediction and control

Since traffic congestion is becoming a serious and worsening problem, extensive research and development are now undertaken to reduce congestion and enhance safety. A new area, namely intelligent vehicle-high systems (IVHS), has drawn great attention from industries and academic institutions. This paper builds a deterministic linear time-variant model for freeway traffic system. Then we study the stability property of the system. In order to reduce the computation time, we decouple the given freeway system with many segments into a sequence of separate subsystems. Thereafter, we formulate a discrete-time moving horizon optimization problem and finally get the optimal solution for ramp-metering, which is in an explicit form of the predictive states.