Modeling and simulation on the bus priority based on actuated traffic signal control at intersections

Abstract

With the rapid development of private vehicles in recent years in China, the traditional bus priority control strategy can’t play a great role in easing heavy traffic anymore. To design a suitable bus priority control scheme to optimize the passing of buses at intersections, while coordinating other traffic movements at the same time, is very significant for urban traffic operation. This paper establishes a bus priority decision model and proposes a decision factor to judge the priority phases that can be calculated from the influence analysis of cars and buses according to delay, queue length and bus arrival rates and other indexes. In addition, a special parameter, named bus response level, is proposed to rank the bus priority applications from different phases. Then the actuated bus priority control process is designed in detail. Some simulation models based on Cellular Automata (CA) theory, such as lane changing model and improved VDR model, traffic elements size and intersection rules are adopted to describe the running behaviors of mixed traffic under this actuated signal control process. The simulation results show that the average delay of buses is obviously lower than that of cars. It means some obvious improvements can be achieved.