Integrated traffic control strategies based on information exchange in Taichung city

Under the policy of e-traffic: Intelligent Traffic Control System, promoted by the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, Taiwan, Taichung city government installed a traffic management and information center to integrate traffic control, traffic information, parking guidance and management, as well as public transportation management for the whole city. In this study, we further developed integrated traffic control strategies to alleviate the traffic congestion in the city area around freeway interchanges. To exchange control messages between the traffic management and information center and freeway traffic control center, administrated by Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau, we set up a set of message types for the interaction and coordination. By means of numerical simulation under various scenarios, it can show that the developed integrated traffic control strategies can indeed improve the overall operation performance by up to 27.37% due to properly reallocating traffic flow in the network.