In the presence of recurrent or non-recurrent congestion, the freeway traffic flow becomes lower than capacity, thus rendering the utilisation of the expensive infrastructure non optimal. One proposed way of ameliorating this situation is ramp metering by use of traffic lights at the freeway on-ramps. This control measure aims at limiting access to the freeway mainstream so as to achieve and maintain capacity flow. Moreover, ramp metering has an impact on the route choice behaviour of drivers and may be purposed by employed as a dynamic assignment tool aiming at a letter utilisation of corridor networks. This paper summarise the main features of the INRETS strategy namely ALINEA and focuses on its past, present and future field implementations in several European countries. Because the field implementations addressed in this paper are quite numerous, only few summarised results can be mentioned for each of them. Detailed results may be found in the provided references. In this paper, some field trials, conducted in the southern part of the Corridor Peripherique in Paris are presented. Field trials have been designed and executed over a period of several months in the aim of investigating corridor traffic phenomena and the impact of ramp metering measures on corridor traffic using ALINEA strategy. More specifically, the reported field trials include a comprehensive data collection from the overall network (Corridor Peripherique) over several weeks with and without ramp metering.
Abstract