Combined Alternate-Direction Lane Assignment and Reservation-based Intersection Control

Abstract

[1] The current method of organizing traffic flows in urban networks, uses directional Right-of-Way links to move traffic between urban intersections. Conflict resolution between vehicles is almost exclusively exercised at the intersections, which turns them into bottlenecks of our urban traffic systems. The recent conflict resolution concepts, that use a reservation-based scheduling approach, improve the efficiency but do not attack the core of the problem. This paper proposes a fundamentally different approach where directional driving paths are altered between neighboring lanes to align vehicles for conflict-less left and right turns at the intersections. Conflicts of the through vehicles are still handled by a reservation-based algorithm. The experiments are executed in FAUSIM - a new simulation tool specially developed to allow flexibility of driving behavior that cannot be found in other tools. The proposed scenario, (called CADLARIC-Combined Alternate-Direction Lane Assignment and Reservation-based Intersection Control) was compared to a conventional Fixed-Time (FT) signals and a novel Fully Reservation-Based Intersection Control (FR-BIC). The results of the experiments, executed on a small three-intersection corridor, show that CADLARIC significantly outperforms the other scenarios in terms of traffic efficiency (delays and stops) and generates a net reduction of conflicting situations when compared to the FR-BIC.