Traffic-Responsive Control Technique for Fully-Actuated Coordinated Signals

This study develops a traffic-responsive control technique for fully-actuated coordinated signals (TCT) to minimize investment in data collection and engineering judgment for signal timing. The operating process of TCT in a day is divided into consecutive cycle sets with
$N$
cycles for each. A vehicle detector is placed on every approach lane to detect time headways and actuate the coordinated and uncoordinated phases. Control center creates the background plans for all the intersections once per cycle set. The fully-actuated logic settings are directly determined by the timing parameters of the background plans in signal controllers. Signal controllers operate the fully-actuated logic and yield the expected greens of the 1
^st
through the
$(N-1)^{\mathrm{ th}}$
cycles of the current cycle set for the coordinated and uncoordinated phases. After the
$N^{\mathrm{ th}}$
cycle starts, the expected greens are sent to control center. Control center processes the expected greens generated in the past cycles of the day and feeds them into Brown’s double exponential smoothing to predict the expected base greens of the next cycle set. They pave the way to stepwise creating the new background plan without using any optimization models. The simulation results indicated that the TCT-enabled intersections could reactively vary their vehicle handling capacity to accommodate the variation in the vehicle demand. In contrast to the conventional control technique for fully-actuated coordinated signals, TCT could provide more progression opportunities to the coordinated movement and serve vehicles with less number of stops and equivalent delay from a system-wide perspective.