Development of a Multimodal Traffic Signal Control Approach for Urban Intersections

Kurzfassung

The main motivations for developing a multimodal control are to ensure the safety and efficiency of the vulnerable modes which are often not recognized in the conventional control strategies. The developed control has some new features such as an exclusive phase for the pedestrians, a protected left-turning phase for the bicyclists and an inclusion of them in the actuation process et cetera. The green time adjustment uses vehicles' headways for executing the actuation process. The considered infrastructure has detectors for the bicycles and they can take part in the actuation process which is rarely found in real practice till now. The control itself is fully actuated and tested till half of the saturation volume (1000 per hour) for a single lane. The waiting time at the signalized intersection is considered as a measure for evaluating the performance and the developed control is compared with a reference control. The reference control replicates the multimodal nature of current practices for urban traffic control. As the control is of fully independent nature, it’s not possible to use the conventional synchronization techniques applied in pre-timed control. However, an idea for partial synchronization is implemented for the major arterial flow with working coordination around 60% probabilities. A certain priority rule is established for the buses which are running in the major arterial with two opposite routes. The developed multimodal control seems quite promising to deal with modal diversity and the results from the simulation studies provide such evidence.