Operational and safety impacts of integrated variable speed limit with dynamic hard shoulder running

The combination of various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) strategies generally has manifold effects, much greater than when strategies are implemented individually. This research introduces a novel dynamic control strategy, which includes the dynamic use of a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based Variable Speed Limit (VSL) integrated with the dynamic use of Hard Shoulder Running (HSR). Both VSL and HSR are proactively triggered to allow for necessary control measures to be taken to delay and possibly avoid the formation of a bottleneck. For traffic prediction, a modified METANET model is developed which takes into consideration the complex nature of driver's behavior along with driver's compliance, capacity drop and posted speed limits. The modified METANET model is shown to be more efficient than conventional macroscopic prediction models in detecting traffic congestions. This MPC based strategy was tested on a section of Deerfoot Trail, Calgary, Alberta using an exclusively developed integrated VISSIM-COM-MATLAB interface. The results from this study suggested that the integrated VSL and HSR control strategy results in a 21.09% increase in average speed and 33.44%. in vehicle-throughput. Furthermore, there was a noticeable reduction in the average travel time by 39.98% and in the total number of stops, by 32.43%. Importantly, the safety analysis performed using Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM) revealed a notable reduction in collisions, by 29.73%.