Evolution of Road Traffic Congestion Control:A Survey from Perspective of Sensing,Communication,and Computation

Road traffic congestion can inevitably de-grade road infrastructure and decrease travel efficiency in urban traffic networks,which can be relieved by employing appropriate congestion control.Accord-ing to different developmental driving forces,in this paper,the evolution of road traffic congestion control is divided into two stages.The ever-growing num-ber of advanced sensing techniques can be seen as the key driving force of the first stage,called the sens-ing stage,in which congestion control strategies ex-perienced rapid growth owing to the accessibility of traffic data.At the second stage,i.e.,the communica-tion stage,communication and computation capabil-ity can be regarded as the identifying symbols for this stage,where the ability of collecting finer-grained in-sight into transportation and mobility reality improves dramatically with advances in vehicular networks,Big Data,and artificial intelligence.Specifically,as the pre-requisite for congestion control,in this paper,ex-isting congestion detection techniques are first elab-orated and classified.Then,a comprehensive survey of the recent advances for current congestion control strategies with a focus on traffic signal control,vehi-cle route guidance,and their combined techniques is provided.In this regard,the evolution of these strate-gies with continuous development of sensing,com-munication,and computation capability are also intro-duced.Finally,the paper concludes with several re-search challenges and trends to fully promote the in-tegration of advanced techniques for traffic congestion mitigation in transportation systems.

Safer Design and Less Cost Operation for Low-Traffic Long-Road Illumination Using Control System Based on Pattern Recognition Technique

The paper covers analysis and investigation of lighting automation system in low-traffic long-roads. The main objective is to provide optimal solution between expensive safe design that utilizes continuous street lighting system at night for the entire road, or inexpensive design that sacrifices the safety, relying on using vehicles lighting, to eliminate the problem of high cost energy consumption during the night operation of the road. By taking into account both of these factors, smart lighting automation system is proposed using Pattern Recognition Technique applied on vehicle number-plates. In this proposal, the road is sectionalized into zones, and based on smart Pattern Recognition Technique, the control system of the road lighting illuminates only the zone that the vehicles pass through. Economic analysis is provided in this paper to support the value of using this design of lighting control system.

Generalized Internal Model Robust Control for Active Front Steering Intervention

Because of the tire nonlinearity and vehicle＇s parameters＇uncertainties,robust control methods based on the worst cases,such as H_∞,μsynthesis,have been widely used in active front steering control,however,in order to guarantee the stability of active front steering system（AFS）controller,the robust control is at the cost of performance so that the robust controller is a little conservative and has low performance for AFS control.In this paper,a generalized internal model robust control（GIMC）that can overcome the contradiction between performance and stability is used in the AFS control.In GIMC,the Youla parameterization is used in an improved way.And GIMC controller includes two sections：a high performance controller designed for the nominal vehicle model and a robust controller compensating the vehicle parameters＇uncertainties and some external disturbances.Simulations of double lane change（DLC）maneuver and that of braking on split-μroad are conducted to compare the performance and stability of the GIMC control,the nominal performance PID controller and the H_∞controller.Simulation results show that the high nominal performance PID controller will be unstable under some extreme situations because of large vehicle＇s parameters variations,H_∞controller is conservative so that the performance is a little low,and only the GIMC controller overcomes the contradiction between performance and robustness,which can both ensure the stability of the AFS controller and guarantee the high performance of the AFS controller.Therefore,the GIMC method proposed for AFS can overcome some disadvantages of control methods used by current AFS system,that is,can solve the instability of PID or LQP control methods and the low performance of the standard H_∞controller.

Leveraging reinforcement learning for dynamic traffic control:A survey and challenges for field implementation

In recent years,the advancement of artificial intelligence techniques has led to significant interest in reinforcement learning(RL)within the traffic and transportation community.Dynamic traffic control has emerged as a prominent application field for RL in traffic systems.This paper presents a comprehensive survey of RL studies in dynamic traffic control,addressing the challenges associated with implementing RL-based traffic control strategies in practice,and identifying promising directions for future research.The first part of this paper provides a comprehensive overview of existing studies on RL-based traffic control strategies,encompassing their model designs,training algorithms,and evaluation methods.It is found that only a few studies have isolated the training and testing environments while evaluating their RL controllers.Subsequently,we examine the challenges involved in implementing existing RL-based traffic control strategies.We investigate the learning costs associated with online RL methods and the transferability of offline RL methods through simulation experiments.The simulation results reveal that online training methods with random exploration suffer from high exploration and learning costs.Additionally,the performance of offline RL methods is highly reliant on the accuracy of the training simulator.These limitations hinder the practical implementation of existing RL-based traffic control strategies.The final part of this paper summarizes and discusses a few existing efforts which attempt to overcome these challenges.This review highlights a rising volume of studies dedicated to mitigating the limitations of RL strategies,with the specific aim of enhancing their practical implementation in recent years.