Study of Freeway Speed Limit Control Based on Three-Phase Traffic Theory

Speed limit control at freeway bottlenecks is numerically studied on the basis of the Kerner-Klenov microscopic stochastic traffic flow model in the context of Kerner's three-phase traffic theory. It turns out that in some cases speed limit control, rather than preventing traffic breakdown, leads to induced congested pattern emergence at the bottleneck, whereas there is free flow at the bottleneck without speed limitation. In other cases, speed limit control can suppress moving jam emergence, which occurs without speed limitation. It is found that these effects are associated with the probabilistic character of traffic breakdown at a bottleneck as well as with complex spatiotemporal congested pattern features.