Robust and Dynamic Prototyping of Strategies for Sustainable Network Congestion Management

本研究项目的重点是探索拥堵管理策略和新战术的部署，特别关注影响汽车司机的一天中的时间和分钟到分钟的行为。在美国的每个大都会地区，道路上都会遇到严重的拥堵。交通拥堵造成的时间损失、能源浪费和污染是令人震惊的，因为它们是永久性的。因此，人们提出了许多管理拥堵及其弊端，特别是内燃机排放的想法和技术，并在全球范围内付诸实施。其中最熟悉的是高载客率车辆(HOV)车道、交通信号协调、拥堵收费和远程办公。这项研究的创新之处在于，它探索了新的数学和计算工具，以快速生成和排序拥塞管理策略的复杂组合，这些策略在整个大都市地区因时间和位置而异。如果这项研究成功，它将为快速原型和筛选直接考虑排放影响的时空拥堵管理策略提供迄今尚不具备的能力。这种能力可能会显著影响交通规划过程，因为与单个决策领导者一起工作的单个工程师将能够生成并初步审查复杂的拥堵管理策略，而不必对感兴趣的网络执行耗时的完整模拟。这些策略可以考虑一个子网络的全天拥堵收费；某些走廊上的匝道计量和信号灯配时的混合；另一个子网络的严格车道分配和速度控制。研究人员将利用这些研究成果，加强本科生和研究生课程中与交通分配、道路拥堵管理和交通可持续发展相关的材料。

The focus of this research project is to explore congestion management strategies and new tactics for their deployment, with special attention given to influencing the time-of-day and minute-to-minute actions of automobile drivers. Significant congestion on roadways is encountered in every metropolitan region of the United States. The time lost, energy resources wasted, and pollution created by traffic congestion are staggering when their perpetual nature is considered. As a consequence, many ideas and technologies for managing congestion and its ills, especially emissions from internal combustion engines, have been proposed and several have been put into practice around the globe. Among the most familiar are high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, traffic signal coordination, congestion pricing, and telecommuting. The innovative aspect of this research is its exploration of new mathematical and computational tools to quickly generate and rank sophisticated mixes of congestion management strategies that vary by time and location across an entire metropolitan region. If this research is successful, it will provide a heretofore missing capability for rapidly prototyping and screening spatiotemporal congestion management strategies that directly consider the impacts of emissions. Such a capability may significantly influence the transportation planning process in that a single engineer working with single decision leader will be able to generate and preliminarily vet complex congestion management strategies without having to perform a full time-consuming simulation of the network of interest. These strategies might consider all-day congestion pricing for a subnetwork; a mix of ramp metering and signal light timing on certain corridors; strict lane assignments and speed controls for another sub-network. The researchers will make use of the research findings to enhance the materials used in the undergraduate and graduate courses related to traffic assignment, road congestion management and transportation sustainability.