Potential Benefits Of Adaptive Signal Control Strategies

Author : Jonathan Corey
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (899 download)

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Download or read book Swarm-intelligence Based Adaptive Signal System written by Jonathan Corey and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With over 300,000 traffic signals in the United States, it is important to everyone that those traffic signals operate optimally. Unfortunately, according to the Institute of Transportation Engineers over 75% of traffic signal control systems are in need of retiming or upgrade. Agencies and practitioners responsible for these signals face significant budgeting and procedural challenges to maintain and upgrade their systems. Transportation professionals have traditionally lacked accessible and effective tools to identify when and where the greatest benefits may be generated through retiming and system feature selection. They have also lacked methods and tools to identify, select and defend choices of new traffic signal control systems. This is especially true for adaptive traffic signal control systems which are generally more expensive and whose adaptive algorithms are proprietary, invalidating many traditional analysis methods. To address these challenges, a new theoretical framework including queuing and traffic signal control models has been developed in this study to predict the impacts of signal control technology on a given corridor. This framework has been implemented in the STAR Lab Toolkit for Analysis of Traffic and Intersection Control Systems (STATICS) that uses an underlying queuing model interacting with simulated traffic signal control logic to develop traffic measures of effectiveness under different traffic signal control strategies and settings. The STATICS toolkit has been employed by the Oregon Department of Transportation and several other transportation agencies to analyze their corridors and select advanced traffic signal control systems. Furthermore, a new cost-effective adaptive traffic signal control system called the Swarm-Intelligence Based Adaptive Signal System (SIBASS) is proposed to address situations where optimum optimization strategies change with traffic conditions. Compared to the existing adaptive signal control systems, SIBASS carries an important advantage that makes it robust under communication difficulties. It operates at the individual intersection level in a flat hierarchy that does not use a central controller. Instead, each intersection self-assigns a role based on current traffic conditions and the current roles of neighboring intersections. Each role uses different optimization goals, allowing SIBASS to change intersection optimization criteria based on the current role chosen by that intersection. By designing cooperative features into SIBASS it is possible to create corridor coordination and optimization. This is accomplished using the characteristics of the swarm rather than external imposition to create order. SIBASS is evaluated via simulation under varied traffic conditions. SIBASS consistently outperformed the existing systems tested in this study. On average, SIBASS reduced system average per vehicle delay by approximately 3.5 seconds and system average queue lengths by 20 feet in the tested scenarios. New approaches to tailoring traffic signal control optimization strategies to current traffic conditions and desired operational goals are enabled by SIBASS. Combined, STATICS and SIBASS offer a solid basis upon which to build future tools and methods to analyze traffic signal control systems. Future STATICS analytical modules may include estimating environmental performance and costs as well as improvements to pedestrian modeling and mobility analysis. Environmental and pedestrian considerations also present opportunities for improvement of SIBASS. New optimization roles can be created for SIBASS to address environmental and pedestrian optimization issues.