Distributed traffic control for reduced fuel consumption and travel time in transportation networks

This paper proposes a distributed framework for optimal control of vehicles in transportation networks. The objective is to reduce the balanced fuel consumption and travel time through hybrid control on speed limit and ramp metering rate. The dual decomposition theory associated with the subgradient method is then applied in order to decompose the optimal control problem into a series of suboptimal problems and then solve them individually via networked road infrastructures (RIs). Coordination among connected RIs is followed in each iteration to update the individual controls. An example is demonstrated to verify the reduction in terms of fuel consumption and travel time using the proposed approach.