Shortest-Way: An Improved Empirical Transition Method for Signal Coordination

Abstract

Four fundamental insights into transition methods are provided from the perspective of traffic engineers. An improved empirical transition method (i.e., Shortest-way) is developed with the goal of reducing the time spent on offset correction and the offset deviations of the coordinated phases during the transition period. Shortest-way operates stepwise and can be activated to correct offset at the scheduled time to switch plans. The maximum amount of adjustment that can be made to a transition cycle length is calculated based on the timing parameters of active phases in the old and new plans. The problem of cycle length distribution is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem, aiming at minimizing the sum of the squares of the intersection offset deviations of all the transition cycles. The portion of the cycle length that can be allocated to each phase in a transition cycle is calculated based on its splits in the old and new plans and its potential contribution to the maximum amount of adjustment to the cycle length. The numerical experimental results proved the potential advantage of Shortest-way over CORSIM Shortway and justified the necessity for managing the time to switch plans at the intersection level.

Urban Safety: An Image-Processing and Deep-Learning-Based Intelligent Traffic Management and Control System

“…TRANSYT (Hale [106]) is the most popular of these control methods. Because traffic demand usually varies over time, the Time-Of-Day (TOD) mode is often used, which consists of a collection of distinct signal plans for different times of the day, such as peaks and off-peaks (Zheng et al [107]). On the other hand, robust signal optimization is used to deal with traffic flow uncertainty, i.e., a scenario-based technique is used in order to ensure the performance of fixed-signal systems (Zhang et al [108]).…”

Design and Evaluation of a Mathematical Optimization Model for Traffic Signal Plan Transition Based on Social Cost Function

“…Ants define this value, depending on their type (AntD, AntF, and AntE) to obtain the attractiveness of their neighbour points in the solution space as expressed in (16), in which is the objective function that corresponds to the ant type , pow, pow = ( , pow, pow) .…”

“…At the end of the iteration, the trail evaporates based on (16), where is the pheromone evaporation coefficient.…”

“…Two approaches have been identified in the literature to address the transition phase: applied methods, which are studies where the transition is attained by a sudden or gradual change of the parameters of the plan, while mathematical methods are based on optimizing operational measures of effectiveness during transition using mathematical models [15,16]. A recent study [15] concluded that most transition articles are focused on applied methods (78.3%) and only a few addressed mathematical methods (21.7%).…”

The positive impacts of designing transition between traffic signal plans considering social cost

“…Studies have demonstrated that the transition between signal timing plans could have either positive or negative impacts, causing increases or decreases in the level of services [7][8][9][10]. Positive impacts are associated with right traffic signal transition strategies and include benefits such as minimum travel time and stops which minimise delays, fuel consumption, and gas emissions.…”