Passenger-oriented traffic management integrating perimeter control and regional bus service frequency setting using 3D-pMFD.

• Propose a control framework for two-region bi-modal traffic networks with 3D-MFD. • Integrate perimeter control with regional bus service frequency setting. • Formulate dynamics of regional bus systems with regional bus frequencies. • Develop a modified GA for optimizing control inputs. Public buses and private vehicles are two main transportation modes for urban road traffic. It has strong flow interactions between the two traffic modes. From data analysis, the vehicle density of a traffic mode not only determine its flow, but also affect the flow of the other mode. With such mixed vehicle flows, the application of traditional traffic management that controls each vehicle flow system separately is limited. Thus, it is beneficial to control both bus and private vehicle flows in an integrated way. Under such bi-modal traffic management, the network efficiency cannot be reflected by vehicle flows since the occupancies of the traffic modes are greatly different. It leads to that the control objective should be necessarily based on passengers. To do so, we adopt bi-modal passenger-based macroscopic fundamental diagram (3D-pMFD) to capture the relations among vehicle accumulations and the total passenger flow in a network. From this aggregate perspective, a passenger-oriented traffic control strategy is proposed by integrating the perimeter control and the regional bus service frequency setting. The characteristics of both traffic modes, especially the operation strategy of buses, are taken into account in the model to describe the bi-modal traffic flow dynamics. A control framework comprised of optimization and simulation is established using model predictive control. The corresponding passenger-based optimization problem is solved by a modified genetic algorithm. With multiple data collected from the network of Shenzhen City in China, numerical experiments are designed to verify the validity and efficiency of the proposed integrated control strategy. Results show that: (1) the proposed strategy can maintain a high level of passenger flow during peak hour with a relatively high demand; (2) the interest of private vehicles is guaranteed even if buses are more recommended in the control strategy; (3) the crowding degree in a bus is reduced properly, which is able to improve the attraction of buses during peak hours; and (4) the proposed passenger-oriented objective results in a comprehensively good performance of the bi-modal network system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]