A Study on Inter-region Flow Control of Urban Traffic: A Modification of the Greedy Control Strategy

The focus of the perimeter control is in managing transfer flow among multiple urban regions. Greedy control (GC) method is a type of regional perimeter control that takes either the minimum or maximum value for the control input. Even though it has an advantage of simplicity for real-time implementation, a previous study showed that it can sometimes give negative impacts due to unnecessary restrictions on transfer flow with highly strict conditions. In this study, in order to reduce the unnecessary restrictions, a modification of the conventional GC is made by easing the strict conditions. The modified method gives exceptions to the flow restriction at certain traffic conditions, in order to increase the throughput of transfer demand in the range of giving only minor impact to the regional traffic. With case study examples, it is shown that the modified GC can outperform the conventional method by just managing the timings of the flow restriction.