An Integrated Control Model for Freeway Corridor Under Nonrecurrent Congestion

This paper presents an integrated model and its solution algorithm for freeway corridor control during incident management. With a parallel arterial as the detour route, the proposed model aims at producing the optimal diversion rates from the freeway mainline to relieve the congestion at the incident segment and concurrently adjust signal timings at the arterial intersections to best accommodate the detour traffic. Different from previous studies, the presented model and algorithm have the following two critical features: 1) modeling explicitly the evolution of detour traffic along the ramps and surface streets with a set of dynamic network flow formulations to capture the local bottlenecks caused by demand surge due to diversion operations and to properly set the responsive signal timing plans and 2) developing a multiobjective optimization framework to maximize the utilization of the available corridor capacity via detour operations but not to incur excessive congestion on the arterials and ramps. This study employs a genetic algorithm (GA)-based heuristic to efficiently yield the reliable solution, depending on the decision maker´s preference. Extensive numerical tests on a segment along the I-95 corridor with its neighboring arterials have demonstrated the potential of the developed model for integrated freeway corridor control.