A Vissim Based Framework for Simulation of Cooperative Ramp Metering

Due to the increase of vehicle numbers in recent decades, there exists a significant problem of reoccurring road traffic congestion. Such congestions are a characteristic of densely populated urban areas. They occur daily during the morning and afternoon rush hours. The road traffic congestion problem can be solved by applying new traffic control approaches from the domain of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). One of the applied services from the domain of ITS related to road traffic management is known as ramp metering. It is used to increase the throughput of urban highways with many nearby onand off-ramps. In order to obtain better control results, several nearby on-ramps are combined together into a cooperative control system. Prior to implementation, such cooperative traffic control systems have to be tested in simulations using appropriate traffic data. One of the simulator tools, which can be used for this task, is VISSIM. It enables a microscopic simulation of road traffic and the implementation of various approaches for traffic control. In this paper the VISSIM simulator is used to implement a framework for simulation of cooperative ramp metering between two nearby on-ramps. The implemented framework is tested using traffic demand values characteristic for rush hours.