A Ramp Control Strategy to Reduce the Traffic Congestion and Emissions via Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure System

To improve freeway traffic congestion and emissions, an improved ALINEA algorithm was proposed integrating vehicle speed guidance and lane-changing. First, a method of integrating VISSIM and Visual C# was proposed to establish a simulation platform using COM interface and Driver Model interface. A traffic field experiment was implemented to collect the traffic operation data on Heiniucheng Road in Tianjin City, China. VISSIM simulation was used to evaluate the total vehicle travel time and MOVES traffic emissions model was utilized to measure the traffic emissions. A case study was conducted, and the study results show that compared with the traditional ALINEA algorithm, the proposed algorithm has better performance. The average speed increases by 12.7% and the total travel time is reduced by 4.5%. As for emissions, CH, CO, NO, and CO₂ decreased by 11.1%, 13.1%, 18.9%, and 20.0%, respectively, indicating that the proposed approach is promising for freeway ramp control optimization.