Route guidance during evacuations integrated with perimeter control strategy in large-scale mixed traffic flow networks

Recent efficient monitoring and traffic management of large-scale mixed traffic networks still remain a challenge for both traffic researchers and practitioners. The difficulty in modeling route guidance evacuation of pedestrian-vehicle mixed flow lies in mixed flow and uneven or heterogeneous network flow. Existing studies have demonstrated that multi-region control can display different layers of traffic state measurement and control, and incorporate heterogeneity effect in the large-scale network dynamics. The optimal perimeter control can manipulate the percentages of flows that transfer between two regions, offering real-time traffic management strategies to improve the network performance. However, the effect of route guidance evacuation integrated with perimeter control strategies in case of heterogeneous traffic networks is still unexplored. The paper advances in this direction by firstly extending route choice behavior aggregation with perimeter control. For an evacuation study, we consider a campus and its surrounding traffic network that can be classified into two types of networks: the first includes emergency areas that involve a large number of evacuees, and the second includes roads that lead to different destinations. The second network consists of some regions with different evacuation directions. Based on the configuration, this paper proposes a route evacuation guidance control strategy that addresses traffic flow first assignment between regions by controlling perimeter flow with the help of Macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) representation and to guide evacuates’ route choice at intersections by LOGIT model in regions. In addition, comparison results show that the proposed route guidance strategy has considerable potential to improve performances and equilibrium conditions (i.e. system optimum and user equilibrium) on the overall network.