Urban arterial traffic intelligent coordination control technique and its application

This paper presents a new intelligent control strategy to solve the coordination control problem of urban arterial traffic. The whole control structure includes two layers - the coordination layer and the control layer. Public cycle time, splits, inbound offset and outbound offset are calculated in the coordination layer. Public cycle time is adjusted by fuzzy rules according to the traffic flow saturation degree of the key intersection. Moreover, the fuzzy rules are implemented by artificial neural networks to improve control system's robusticity. Splits are calculated based on historical and real-time traffic information. Offsets are calculated by the real-time average speeds. The control layer determines phase composition and adjusts splits at the end of each cycle. The target of this control strategy is to maximize the possibility for vehicles in each direction along the arterial road to pass the local intersection without stop while the utility efficiency of the green signal time is at relatively high level. The actual application results show the proposed method can decrease the average travel time and average number of stops, and increase the average travel speed for vehicles on the arterial road effectively.