Perimeter Control With State-Dependent Delays: Optimal Control Model and Computational Method

Perimeter control is to manipulate traffic flows in different regions through adjusting traffic signals at the border of the regions. Traditionally, the complete trips in a region are assumed to be dependent on the current accumulated vehicles in this region. This assumption is invalid because the vehicle needs time to complete its trip in a region. In order to solve this shortcoming, some recent studies have introduced a time-delay dynamical system to describe the dynamical behaviour of the accumulated vehicles in a region. However, in these studies, the perimeter control problem is formulated as a tracking problem with a given optimal reference point. In reality, such an optimal reference point is unavailable in advance. This paper will fill this gap through formulating perimeter control as an optimal control problem governed by a state-dependent time delay system. The control parametrization technique and an exact penalty method are introduced to solve such a challenging optimal control problem. Model predictive control is applied to obtain close-loop solution through solving a series of online optimal control problems. Some experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.