Emission optimized control for isolated intersections

Abstract

Stopping and accelerating at traffic lights is one of the main contributing factors to vehicular emissions in urban environments. The work in this paper demonstrates a generic guideline for minimizing CO2 emissions at traffic lights. This was done using an adaptive control, which uses a cost function for optimization, rather than network-specific control parameters. A new version of the emission model PHEMlight was used, which added of a fuel cut-off mode during coasting and other improvements compared to the previous version. Using this model, it could be determined that the emission optimal ratio between delay time and stops for the cost function of an adaptive control should be 1:4.8. Using this ratio a reduction of 7.6 % of CO2 emissions was achieved compared to a vehicle actuated control.