The 22nd COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP 2022)

Adaptive ramp metering is designated to release on-ramp flow based on the level of congestion on the mainline freeway. Under oversaturation condition, spillback on the on-ramp may occur and then the operation of the immediately upstream signalized intersection would be impeded. It is therefore necessary to address this issue through an integration of the on-ramp metering system with the signal at the upstream intersection of the on-ramp that connects with a local street.  In this paper, an integrated synthetic approach is presented to investigate performance of three scenarios: traditional ramp metering system with no detector, and integrated ramp meter and the upstream signal with the support of multiple detectors and Connected Vehicle (CV) data source, respectively. The resulting diagrams of time-spacing vs. aggregated MOEs are visualized to intuitionally identify the deficiencies of the traditional detectors and benefits from multiple detector strategy as well as CV data utilization. The simulation results suggest positive benefits of improving traffic operation on ramps, the upstream signalized intersection and mainline freeway by using the CV data source, whereas multiple detector strategy performs better than traditional ramp metering system.