Integrated anticipatory control

Traditional traffic control is in most cases reactive: it responds to certain past and/or current traffic conditions. In the design of traffic control plans, past conditions determine the off-line or on-line implementation of traffic control plans. Also, most current on-line traffic control systems (local or area wide) only take the current traffic conditions into account or, at the best, make predictions for the arrival pattern at the stop-line. This paper investigates some of the possibilities of anticipatory control. Anticipatory control takes not only the current, but also the future traffic conditions into account. These future traffic conditions are related to the behaviour of road users. With behaviour not the short term driving behaviour is mend, such as choice of lane or speed level, but the long term behaviour such as route choice and choice of departure time. Traffic control should anticipate this behaviour. In most cases motorways and urban roads are operated and maintained by different road managers. These road managers are responsible for their own piece of the network and only try to optimise their part. In the paper integrated control is studied, which means that the network is considered to be one network. It shows the advantages of working together to decrease the congestion problem. In the paper the interaction between traffic control and route choice for integrated networks is studied. This is called the integrated traffic control and assignment problem. The problem formulation will be given and the algorithms to solve it. Several control strategies are described and compared with each other. One of these strategies is anticipatory control, which takes the route choice behaviour into account. The results are given for two networks combining a motorway and urban roads. The paper gives the results of the calculations and draws some conclusions.