An efficient computation algorithm for area traffic control problem with link capacity expansions

An area traffic control problem is considered where the set of link capacity expansions and signal setting variables are simultaneously determined. This problem can be formulated as an optimization problem by taking the user equilibrium traffic assignment as a constraint. In this paper, an efficient computation algorithm based on the projected Quasi-Newton method is presented to effectively solve the area traffic control problem. Numerical calculations on a real data road network are conducted. As it shows, the proposed method combining the locally optimal search and global search heuristic achieved substantially better performance than did traditional approaches in solving the area traffic control problem with expansions of link capacity.