Dynamic Traffic Signal Timing Optimization Strategy Incorporating Various Vehicle Fuel Consumption Characteristics

Abstract

This paper proposes a dynamic traffic signal timing optimization strategy (DTSTOS) based on various vehicle fuel consumption and dynamic characteristics to minimize the combined total energy consumption and traffic delay for vehicles passing through an intersection. With increasing penetration of new vehicle types and configurations, vehicle fuel consumption characteristics have become rather diversified and dynamic and need to be explicitly incorporated in the traffic light timing control to reduce total energy consumption and traffic delay. Through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, information and states of individual vehicles around an intersection can be made available to the traffic light controller to produce optimal traffic light timing. Unified and control-oriented speed-type fuel consumption models for various types of vehicles in conjunction with a simplified traffic model are employed to conduct real-time traffic light timing control optimization using an iterative grid search (IGS) method. The effectiveness of the DTSTOS was evaluated and demonstrated with a traffic simulator in VISSIM with various traffic flows and vehicle types. The proposed timing plan was compared with Synchro, and consistent results were obtained.