Integrated traffic flow and emission control based on FASTLANE and the multi-class VT-macro model

The main goal of this paper is to develop a multi-class traffic flow and emission model that is suited for on-line model-based control. Multi-class traffic flow and emission models take into account the heterogeneous nature of traffic networks. In comparison with single-class models, these models are more accurate. Using more accurate model results in better description of the traffic network. However, this also leads to lower a computation speed when the model is used for on-line model-based control. FASTLANE is a first-order multi-class traffic flow model that is faster than second-order models (such as METANET). However, FASTLANE does not yet describe emission and fuel consumption. Therefore, we propose to integrate FASTLANE with the VT-macro emission model. This results in a combined FASTLANE and multi-class VT-macro model that describes multi-class traffic flows and emissions and that yields a balanced trade-off between the accuracy and the computation speed. On-line model predictive control is used to obtain a balanced optimization of the total time spent and the total emissions. A case study is implemented to validate the efficiency of the new integrated FASTLANE and multi-class VT-macro model. The simulation results indicate that considering the heterogeneous nature of multi-class traffic leads to a better control performance than single-class models.