Co-design of traffic network topology and control measures

•A unified problem formulation for co-design of network topology and control is given.•Four different solution frameworks for solving the co-design problem are proposed.•A simulation-based case study is used to show the results of the co-design approach.

The two main directions to improve traffic flows in networks involve changing the network topology and introducing new traffic control measures. In this paper, we consider a co-design approach to apply these two methods jointly to improve the interaction between different methods and to get a better overall performance. We aim at finding the optimal network topology and the optimal parameters of traffic control laws at the same time by solving a co-optimization problem. However, such an optimization problem is usually highly non-linear and non-convex, and it possibly involves a mixed-integer form. Therefore, we discuss four different solution frameworks that can be used for solving the co-optimization problem, according to different requirements on the computational complexity and speed. A simulation-based study is implemented on the Singapore freeway network to illustrate the co-design approach and to compare the four different solution frameworks.