Cooperative Vehicle Actuated Traffic Control in Urban Areas

Abstract

Rapid increasing in the number of vehicles in urban areas directly affects traffic quality because of the physical limitations of road infrastructure. Frequent congestions in the cities cause the increase of delays, stop-and-go actions and especially travel times. Up-to-date methods of traffic control are focused on advanced intelligent transport systems solutions in order to increase the quality of urban traffic network. This is directly affects improvement of traffic parameters quality such as travel time, delay, etc. Also, defined parameters affect the quality of environmental factors in urban traffic network (emission of pollution from motor vehicles, fuel consumption, noise level, etc.). Higher level of traffic control is enabled by direct real-time communication between vehicles (personal vehicles, public transport vehicles, etc.). This method outperforms traditional fixed cycle management of signalized intersections, which use predetermined signal plans. Benefits of using cooperative actuated control where model with implemented control algorithms is compared with existing traffic model with fixed time signal plans are described. The main goal is to harmonize traffic flow with optimal vehicle speed and to reduce the number of stop-and-go actions which directly affects emission of pollution and fuel consumption.