Fault-Tolerant Control of Variable Speed Limits for Freeway Work Zone Using Likelihood Estimation

Freeway work zone with lane closure can lead to disruption to local traffic and cause significant impacts on mobility, safety and environmental sustainability. To mitigate traffic congestion near work zone area, many variable speed limits (VSL) control approaches have been developed. However, VSL control system, as a critical transportation management system, is prone to the occurrence of traffic sensor faults. Faulty sensors can cause great deviations of traffic measurements and system degradation. Therefore, this study aims to develop a fault-tolerant VSL control strategy for freeway work zone with the consideration of the mainline sensor fault and ramp sensor fault. To analyze the traffic dynamics near work zone area, a traffic flow model has been built first. Then a sliding mode controller in the previous study has been utilized for VSL control. In addition to the traffic states estimated by a Kalman filter, two observers have been developed to provide analytical redundancy of traffic states estimation. By comparing the logarithm of the likelihood estimations from the Kalman filter and two observers, a fault diagnosis scheme has been designed to detect and identify the faults of mainline sensors and ramp sensors. Then the VSL controller can be reconfigured accordingly in case of sensor faults. The proposed system is implemented and evaluated under a realistic freeway work zone environment using traffic simulator SUMO. The results demonstrate that the developed system can accurately detect and identify the sensor faults in real time. Consistent improvements of mobility, safety and sustainability are also achieved under fault-free and sensor faults scenarios.