Introducing Offsets to the Virtual Phase-link Street Traffic Model for Arterial Traffic Control

Abstract

In our previous work, we proposed a Virtual Phase-Link street traffic model to provide optimal control of green splits. The simulations implemented the offsets which were obtained from Vistro offline. Offsets can significantly impact the performance of arterial traffic controls. This paper introduces offsets as optimization variables to the Virtual Phase-Link street traffic model. Based on the optimization results from the optimal green splits control proposed in the previous work, we derived the delay function for offsets optimization. The proposed offsets optimization were tested under two scenarios of the same arterial against their base cases in simulations. It was found that in both scenarios, the proposed method resulted in significantly less delay compared to the base cases. It was also found that the proposed offsets optimization method can identify the dominant traffic path and provide progression optimization for it.