Development and Comparative Evaluation of Ramp Metering Algorithms Using Microscopic Traffic Simulation

Freeway ramp metering is an efficient freeway control that can ameliorate freeway congestion by limiting the number of vehicles entering the freeway. This study presents development and comparative evaluation of five ramp controls including no control, time-of-day plan, and three well-known ramp metering algorithms; ALINEA, FLOW and Stratified Zone through the use of microscopic traffic simulation. In this paper, ramp controls were developed and evaluated using Microscopic Traffic Simulation, AIMSUN NG. The simulation model of the Pacific Motorway in Queensland, Australia was used as a test-bed model. The results from the study indicated that ramp metering was basically found to be able to improve network performances up to 40% compared to no control. In terms of network and freeway mainline performance, ALINEA was superior to other algorithms under both normal and high traffic demand, whereas, Stratified Zone was the best algorithm for on-ramp performance. In terms of on-ramp performance, ALINEA was found to generate the lowest on-ramp performance. FLOW was found to be slightly superior to Stratified Zone. However, the trend was opposite for on-ramp performance. Gini coefficient was applied to measure the road user equity under the implementation of different algorithms. The results showed that FLOW was the most equitable algorithm, whereas, ALINEA was the worst. The results also indicated that network performance and on-ramp performance were trade-off in the presence of ramp metering operation.