The Role of Trip Lengths Calibration in Model-Based Perimeter Control Strategies

Since the introduction of the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD), many traffic control strategies and algorithms have been developed to implement MFD-based perimeter control over a specific urban region. A model-based controller consists of two components: a plant model that represents reality; and a prediction model used to determine optimal control actions. In most studies, the authors assume a constant average trip length for all drivers traveling within the same region, for the prediction model. In these studies about perimeter control and MFD traffic models, the controllers show a good performance because accumulations, i.e. traffic states, from the plant are used to reflect the initial state of the prediction model with a high frequency (about a few seconds). However, this average trip length changes over time as it depends on the Origin-Destination flow decomposition, playing an important role in real applications. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we show that the assumption about constant trip lengths used in the prediction model deteriorates the controller's performance for low frequency updates of the optimal control actions. Second, we propose a methodological framework based on the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) for dynamically adjusting the average trip lengths and accumulations. Our test results on a real city network show that applying this methodological framework significantly improves the controller's performance.