Robust and Dynamic Prototyping of Strategies for Sustainable Network Congestion Management

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.