A model predictive control strategy for the auxiliary road adjacent to the freeway off-ramp

The congestion of the freeway off-ramp area has been a problem in China. This article proposes a model predictive control (MPC) approach for the auxiliary road near the off-ramp to solve the problem. The cell transmission model (CTM) is adopted to model the traffic network and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used as the optimization algorithm for MPC strategy. The control objective used in this paper is the total delay of all vehicles in the network. The performance of this method is compared with the existing control methods including no control, fixed-time control, and ALINEA strategy. The results illustrate that the method developed in this essay ensures a better performance than others and has potential benefits.