Joint Route Guidance and Demand Management for Real-Time Control of Multi-Regional Traffic Networks

In this work, we propose a joint route guidance and demand management strategy for multi-region networks with macroscopic traffic dynamics. Route guidance is used to identify the optimal transfer flows between neighbouring regions so that the trip completion rate across all regions is maximized. Demand management is utilized to control the traffic flows entering the network by forcing a portion of the traffic flows to wait at their origin. Towards this direction, we develop a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that aims to minimize the total time spent by all vehicles in the network (including the waiting time at the origin) by jointly optimizing the demand flows allowed in the network and the transfer flows between regions. To solve the resulting nonconvex and nonlinear optimization problem, by relaxing the nonconvex constraints, we develop a novel Linear Programming formulation that provides tight lower bounds on the optimal solution, as well as a feasible solution through the proposed MPC framework. Furthermore, (in another formulation) we restrict each region to only operate in the free-flow regime of the macroscopic fundamental diagram, which enables the transformation of the problem to a linear MPC formulation which can be solved in real-time using standard solvers and which provides a feasible solution to the original MPC problem. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the linear MPC schemes execute in real-time and yield near-optimal results even under heavy traffic scenarios.