DESIGNING HIGHWAY ACCESS CONTROL SYSTEM USING MULTI-CLASS M/G/C/C STATE DEPENDENT QUEUEING MODEL AND CROSS-ENTROPY METHOD

摘要

In this paper, we consider a futuristic scenario where there exists a special lane in a segment of a highway; vehicles which wish to use the lane must send access requests ahead of time; and only the vehicles whose requests are accepted can use the lane. While some existing express lanes try to control traffic by dynamic pricing on the usage of the lanes based on consumer demand, we control traffic by accepting or rejecting access requests to the lane. Vehicle classes are defined by vehicle sizes and carry a different number of passengers. Our goal is to find an optimal allocation of the lane capacity among different vehicle classes which maximizes the long-run average passenger throughput. We use a multi-class M/G/C/C state dependent model to calculate the long-run average passenger throughput for a given allocation and use a cross-entropy method to find an optimal allocation among a large number of possible allocations. We briefly discuss how this problem formulation is applicable to general resource sharing problems and then discuss how to dynamically control acceptance/rejection of access requests to further enhance the real-time efficiency of our system.