English

Traffic regulation via controlled speed limit

Optimization and Control 2016-03-16 v1

Abstract

We study an optimal control problem for traffic regulation via variable speed limit. The traffic flow dynamics is described with the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) model with Newell-Daganzo flux function. We aim at minimizing the L2L^2 quadratic error to a desired outflow, given an inflow on a single road. We first provide existence of a minimizer and compute analytically the cost functional variations due to needle-like variation in the control policy. Then, we compare three strategies: instantaneous policy; random exploration of control space; steepest descent using numerical expression of gradient. We show that the gradient technique is able to achieve a cost within 10% of random exploration minimum with better computational performances.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.04785,
  title  = {Traffic regulation via controlled speed limit},
  author = {Maria Laura Delle Monache and Benedetto Piccoli and Francesco Rossi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.04785},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:11:35.717Z