Optimal Control Theory in Intelligent Transportation Systems Research - A Review

Continuous motorization and urbanization around the globe leads to an expansion of population in major cities. Therefore, ever-growing pressure imposed on the existing mass transit systems calls for a better technology, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), to solve many new and demanding management issues. Many studies in the extant ITS literature attempted to address these issues within which various research methodologies were adopted. However, there is very few paper summarized what does optimal control theory (OCT), one of the sharpest tools to tackle management issues in engineering, do in solving these issues. It’s both important and interesting to answer the following two questions. (1) How does OCT contribute to ITS research objectives? (2) What are the research gaps and possible future research directions? We searched 11 top transportation and control journals and reviewed 41 research articles in ITS area in which OCT was used as the main research methodology. We categorized the articles by four different ways to address our research questions. We can conclude from the review that OCT is widely used to address various aspects of management issues in ITS within which a large portion of the studies aimed to reduce traffic congestion. We also critically discussed these studies and pointed out some possible future research directions towards which OCT can be used.