The amount of vehicles and therefor the density of roads increased a lot in the Netherlands. Controlling the traffic at a network scale became very important. Due to increasing congestion on the Dutch roads, the demand for road capacity increases. To increase the amount of road capacity, new infrastructure could be build. The costs for this solution are however very high. Instead of new infrastructure, a better utilisation of the existing infrastructure could cope with this problem. A better utilisation of the existing infrastructure can be reached by carrying out dynamic traffic management (DTM). DTM is however more efficient for local control instead of large-scale network control. For DTM, a description of the traffic state in a network is needed. The Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) can be used in an observation based method in order to describe the level of service of a network.
A promising field of application of the MFD is supporting control strategies in urban networks. So far, MFD has been used in order to evaluate the traffic state of (sub)networks. Beside using the MFD as an evaluation tool, other traffic evaluation parameters are used as well. The total travel time is one of these possible traffic evaluation parameters.
In this thesis a controller for a subnetwork will be designed which is based on MFD’s when implementing a certain traffic measure scenario in order to gain the desired traffic flows which are set up by the main controller of the entire network. The MFD will thus be the control mechanism in the controller which will be designed. Which traffic measures can be taken into account in the traffic measure will take a central position in the study. Traffic signals, ramp metering signals and dynamic route information panels (DRIP’s) are examples of these possible traffic measures.