Report

Automated vehicles are conventional vehicles equipped with advanced sensors, controller and actuators. They achieve intelligent information exchange with the environment through the onboard sensing and cooperative system. vehicles are possible to have situation awareness and automatically analyze the safety and dangerous state of journeys. Finally vehicles can reach destinations following drivers’ willing. The ongoing research on intelligent vehicles is mainly about improving the safety, comfort, efficiency and provide an excellent human-car interface. As a self-organizing system, the traffic system is quite complicated. There are many disturbance factors to lead to various traffic problems. One of the daily occurring problems is… Read More »Analysis of current Dutch traffic management effectiveness with automated vehicles: a ramp-metering case study

In order to find a solution for congestion many studies research and implement automated driving (AD). This research considers connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) as a prime candidate for this solution. CAVs are able to drive in platoons with small inter-vehicle time gaps. CAV platoons with small inter-vehicle time gaps can increase the throughput on the motorway, however before this will occur a high penetration rate is deemed necessary. This research described in this report is meant to look at the implementation of CAVs when the penetration rate is still low, this is the case at initial deployment. The problem… Read More »Active platoon formation in congestion with Dynamic Dedicated Lane Sections

Traffic management measures are implemented successfully in practice like in the Field Operational Test ‘Praktijkproef Amsterdam’. With increasing congestion every year on Dutch freeways, improvement of existing traffic management measures are necessary. One of these measures is ramp metering. Ramp metering regulates the inflow from the onramp on to the mainline of the freeway. In the thesis the focus is on traffic-responsive local ramp metering. A commonly used ramp-metering algorithm is the ALINEA algorithm. A variation of this algorithm is used in the Praktijkproef Amsterdam (PPA). This variation, with density as traffic variable, uses a parameter estimator, which estimates the… Read More »A possible new adaptive control approach for ramp metering

Traffic management measures are implemented successfully in practice like in the Field Operational Test ‘Praktijkproef Amsterdam’. The situation on freeways gradually improves when dynamic traffic management is applied. With increasing congestion every year on Dutch freeways, new measures or improvement of existing traffic management measures are necessary. One of these measures is ramp metering. Ramp metering regulates the inflow from the onramp on to the mainline of the freeway. In the thesis the focus is on traffic-responsive local ramp metering, it responds to the actual traffic situation and the on-ramp flow is regulated by a ramp-metering algorithm. A commonly used… Read More »Using speed limits to prevent congestion at fixed infrastructural bottlenecks

Large scale disasters, such as floods and fires, cause many casualties. This risk of casualties is reduced by evacuating the people from the threatened region. By guiding these people, i.e. instructing them when and where to go, the efficiency of the evacuation is increased. This means that, for example, the time needed for the evacuation is reduced. While many optimization methods were developed, the attention for uncertainty and compliance behavior in these methods is limited. This while these factors are of great importance for evaluating guidance in a realistic way. These findings are the reason to ask the following question:… Read More »Robust model-based optimization of evacuation guidance

Traffic control is the part of dynamic traffic management in which traffic management measures are controlled to optimize the capacity of networks. Since September 2011 traffic management scenarios are applied for the A15 highway, an important access road for the Port of Rotterdam Area. Traffic management scenarios is the most advanced traffic control method that is applied in practice today. The current state of art in traffic control research is Model Predictive Control (MPC), an adaptive method that calculates the optimal control signal and adjusts it to changing traffic states. In this study the MPC method is compared with the… Read More »Evaluating multi-class model predictive control

Since the second half of last century, traffic congestion on road network has become a predominant phenomenon due to the rapid increases in transport demand and number of vehicles. It starts to become clear until later that century traffic congestion cannot be solved single-handedly by expansions of road network. During peak hours, besides recurrent congestion caused by insatiable demand, non-recurrent congestion caused by incidents, adverse weather conditions and work zones, are becoming more problematic with their temporary disturbances causing traffic breakdowns. Developments and deployments of traffic control strategies come into effect to solve recurrent and non-recurrent congestions with a synthesis… Read More »A framework for the modelling and ex-ante evaluation of coordinated network management

Dynamic Traffic Management (DTM) is preferred rather than the construction of new roads to increase traffic performance. DTM measures are usually not coordinated and thus have no interaction with each other. It is possible that DTM measures solve a problem locally but create another problem elsewhere in the network. To manage the scale, a hierarchical approach can be considered in which an upper level control calculates the desired traffic states in the subnetworks it is responsible for. Recently, empirical evidence is found that the traffic state of an urban road network can be described by a diagram with a constant… Read More »Coordinated signal control for urban networks by using MFD

Road users have never had as much travel information as is available today. However the extent of congestion on major roads has also never been as critical as it is now. For this reason road authorities, including Rijkswaterstaat, aim to inform road users as best they can in an effort to allow the road user to make a more educated decision on travel and to increase the confidence they have in travel times, also during roadworks.   The main result described in this thesis is a methodology incorporated in a model, which is capable of predicting travel times on motorway corridors for situations during roadworks… Read More »A-priori travel time predictor for long term roadworks on motorways

The motorway network in the Netherlands still has to cope with a lot of congestion. To improve this situation in an effective and efficient way it is important to identify the most vulnerable links in a network correctly. Useful measures on those links will not only improve the flow on the network, but will also contribute to road safety. Within Rijkswaterstaat there are two methods that try to locate vulnerable links. In this thesis these two methods are tested and corrected. Also, the two main components to classify vulnerability are analyzed with empirical data: the chance of an accident and… Read More »Onderzoek naar de identificatie van kwetsbare wegvakken