Traffic Signal Control in a Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Environment Considering Pedestrians

Download or read book Traffic Signal Control in a Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Environment Considering Pedestrians written by Xiao Liang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traffic signals help to maintain order in urban traffic networks and reduce vehicle conflicts by dynamically assigning right-of-way to different vehicle movements. However, by temporarily stopping vehicle movements at regular intervals, traffic signals are a major source of urban congestion and cause increased vehicle delay, fuel consumption, and environmental pollution. Connected and Autonomous Vehicle technology may be utilized to optimize traffic operations at signalized intersections, since connected vehicles have the ability to communicate with the surrounding infrastructure and autonomous vehicles can follow the instructions from the signal or a central control system. Connected vehicle information received by a signal controller can be used to help adjust signal timings to tailor to the specific dynamic vehicle demand. Information about the signal timing plan can then be communicated back to the vehicles so that they can adjust their speeds/trajectories to further improve traffic operations. Based on a thorough literature review of existing studies in the area of signal control utilizing information from connected and autonomous vehicles, three research gaps are found: 1) application are limited to unrealistic intersection configurations; 2) methods are limited to a single mode; or, 3) methods only optimize the average value of measure of effectiveness while ignoring the distribution among vehicles. As a part of this dissertation, several methods will be proposed to increase computational efficiency of an existing CAV-based joint signal timing and vehicle trajectory optimization algorithm so that it can be applied to more realistic intersection settings without adding computational burden. Doing so requires the creation of new methods to accommodate features like multiple lanes on each approach, more than two approaches and turning maneuvers. Methods to incorporate human-driven cooperative vehicles and pedestrians are also proposed and tested. A more equitable traffic signal control method is also designed.