Abstract
The performance of three different types of traffic-responsive, coordinated ramp metering strategies is analyzed using simulation. The selected metering approaches include the incremental group coordination method being implemented in Denver, Colorado; the fuzzy logic–based, implicit coordination approach from Seattle, Washington; and the bottleneck-based, sectionwide explicit coordination strategy being operated in Minnesota. The macroscopic simulation analysis using a 16-mi (25.7-km) freeway section in Minneapolis, Minnesota, indicated that the incremental coordination approach adopting a queue-override policy resulted in consistently less restrictive metering than did the other two algorithms. Further, the Minnesota system, which does not employ a ramp queue management policy, produced more evenly distributed traffic patterns on the mainline, whereas the fuzzy metering algorithm showed more flexibility in dealing with the atypical demand pattern than did the other metering approaches.
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