Evaluation of Variable Speed Limit under Connected Vehicle environment

The Variable Speed Limit (VSL) application provides travelers with dynamic speed advisory information to keep optimal traffic flow conditions for freeways and corridors under both recurrent and non-recurrent congestion incurred by incidents and/or work-zones. By coupling VSL and Connected Vehicle (CV) environment enabling two-way wireless communications for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure, it is expected to achieve improved performance of VSL as a viable traffic congestion mitigation tool. This digest paper presents the impact of connected vehicle on the effectiveness of VSL on a freeway bottleneck section by using a microscopic simulation model. Simulation experimental results show that CV-powered VSL improves the traffic congestion conditions up to 7–12% depending on CV market penetration rates.