Monitoring and Reducing Vehicular Impact on Air Quality at Intersections: A Case Study in China

Abstract

Air pollution has been a serious problem in China for many years. One of the main reasons for this is the rapid growth in motorized traffic which results in lots of traffic congestion in metropolitan areas. This study aims to monitor and reduce traffic's impact on air quality at intersections, with the use of the object detecting and tracking technique and traffic signal control optimization. A field campaign is executed at a selected intersection in Hefei, China and the collected emission data is used for examining and ensuring how reasonable the simulated emission productions are. The simulative approach shows that the proposed signal control method greatly increases the efficiency of the traffic operation and, at the same time, reduces the amount of emission production. A field test of the proposed method is under preparation for verifying the simulation results and will be carried out within two months.

Real-Time Microscopic Traffic Simulation and Optimization at Intersections with Video Traffic Detection

“…During the peak periods, there are high traffic volumes at intersections and the duration of the given maximum green time is often reached. Thus, the respective improvement is limited when comparing the traffic delay with that from the given static traffic signal control program [17].…”

“…It has been continuously developed for more than 15 years and has be extensively successfully applied in different projects related to urban traffic management, traffic emission, V2X and other diverse traffic issues [18][19]. Some simulation works [17,20] with SUMO for the City Hefei, China has been conducted as well.…”

“…SUMO's emission model is based on the emission model HABEFA 3.1 (The Handbook of Emission Factors for Road Transport) [21]. The results in [17] show that the time series trend of the simulated emissions (CO, NOx) corresponds quite well with that of the respective measured immissions, especially during the daytime when most of traffic occurs. The non-vehicle emissions cannot be simulated by SUMO.…”