Motorway Tidal Flow Lane Control

The expansion of road infrastructure, in spite of increasing congestion levels, faces severe restrictions from all sorts: economical, environmental, social, or technical. An efficient and, usually, less expensive alternative to improve mobility and the use of available infrastructure is the adoption of traffic management. A particular case of interest occurs when inbound and outbound traffic on a given facility is unbalanced throughout the day. This scenario may benefit of a lane management strategy called tidal flow (or reversible) lane control, in which case the direction of one or more contraflow buffer lanes is reversed according to the needs of each direction. This paper proposes a simple and practical real-time strategy for efficient motorway tidal flow lane control. A state-feedback switching policy based on the triangular fundamental diagram, that requires only aggregated measurements of density, is adopted. A theoretical analysis based on the kinematic wave theory shows that the strategy provides a Pareto-optimal solution. Microsimulations using empirical data from the A38(M) Aston Expressway in Birmingham, UK, are used to demonstrate the operation of the proposed strategy. The robustness of the switching policy to parameter variations is demonstrated by parametric sensitivity analysis. Simulation results confirm an increase of motorway throughput and a smooth operation for the simulated scenarios.