Improving traffic efficiency at merge bottleneck: a combined variable speed limit and logic rule-based lane change control approach

Considering the limited effectiveness of a single traffic control strategy in alleviating traffic congestion at merging bottleneck on highway, this paper establishes a merging bottleneck model on a multi-lane cell transmission model (CTM) and proposes an integrated control method of variable speed limit (VSL) and lane change control (LC). Feedback-based VSL limits the upstream traffic demand and harmonizes the traffic operation state, while the LC uses lane change logic to change the distribution among the lanes of the bottleneck upstream, mitigating the mutual disturbance between the mainline and ramp traffic and minimizing the negative impact of capacity drop. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed integrated control method.