Dynamic signal control for at-grade intersections under preliminary autonomous vehicle environment

Abstract

Autonomous vehicle technology will transform fundamentally urban traffic systems. To better enhance the coming era of connected and autonomous vehicles, effective control strategies that interact wisely with these intelligent vehicles for signalized at-grade intersections are indispensable. Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication technology offers unprecedented clues to reduce the delay at signalized intersections by innovative information-based control strategies. This paper proposes a new dynamic control strategy for signalized intersections with vehicle-to-signal information. The proposed strategy is called periodic vehicle holding (PVH) strategy while the traffic signal can provide information for the vehicles that are approaching an intersection. Under preliminary autonomous vehicle (PAV) environment, left-turning and through-moving vehicles will be sorted based on different information they receive. The paper shows how PVH reorganizes traffic to increase the capacity of an intersection without causing severe spillback to the upstream intersection. Results show that PVH can reduce the delay by approximately 15% at a signalized intersection under relatively high traffic demand.