Riccardo Scarinci

Centre for Transport Studies, University College London

May 16, 2013, 11:00, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)

Managing motorway traffic at junctions: a Ramp Metering strategy using Cooperative Vehicles

In the area of Active Traffic Management, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are widely used to reduce congestion on motorways. In this vein, emerging technologies continually offer new communication capabilities that can be used to improve performance. The aim of this study is to develop a novel Ramp Metering strategy, exploiting communication capabilities to further reduce congestion at motorway junctions. This new system rearranges gaps present in the motorway traffic by requesting cooperation from participating vehicles in order to facilitate merging. Macroscopic traffic flow theory is used to develop the control algorithm, and microscopic simulation of individual vehicles is used to evaluate the system traffic performance. Results indicate reduction of congestion occurrence, improvement in merging capacity and increase in travel time reliability. This shows how the use of new communication technologies can improve the performance of current ITS and lead to a reduction of congestion on motorways.

Bio

Riccardo Scarinci is a PhD student at the Centre for Transport Studies at University College London. His current research on Cooperative Intelligent Transport System is part of the European Commission FP7 project NEARCTIS, and it has been developed in collaboration with the Technical University of Delft � The Netherlands. Before joining UCL he worked as research assistant at the Laboratory for Mobility and Transport at Politecnico di Milano � Italy, investigating ex-ante and ex-post evaluation of ITS for the European Commission projects EasyWay and 2DECIDE.