Highways England is looking to set up a task for the provision of services to investigate how to improve upon existing performance of our Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic
signalling (MIDAS) System by developing new traffic management algorithms or by better utilising existing data sources.
Algorithm techniques have advanced significantly in recent years and whilst Highways England's existing algorithms are perfectly adequate to perform their duty, as a company we are keen to remain a world leader in traffic management techniques and, with the emergence
of Expressway schemes, explore new approaches to congestion and safety.
Highways England currently use two traffic management algorithms as part of their operation of smart motorways. The congestion management (CM) algorithm seeks to delay the onset of flow breakdown and the queue protection (QP) algorithm seeks to protect queues when network congestion exists. The algorithms ingest traffic data from fixed data collection infrastructure, evaluate conditions and seek to change the traffic conditions on the network by setting signals (variable mandatory speed limits, VMSLs).
The Congestion Management (CM) algorithm is a proactive algorithm: it sets signals in response to high flows, to manage traffic and reduce the occurrences of flow breakdown.