Adaptive Traffic Signal Control Under Mixed Traffic Condition

The growing use of powered two wheelers (PTWs), coupled with their unique moving behaviors, has considerably influenced the overall traffic characteristics, requiring new approaches to traffic management and monitoring strategies. The present paper studies the effect of two-wheelers traffic on adaptive traffic signal control (ASC) and the methods to optimize the control plan for traffic flow consisting of PTWs and cars. For this reason, the queue build-up and dissipation processes are analyzed with a gradual increase of PTWs ratio. Besides, the effect of advanced stop lines, which are intended to give a head start for PTWs on the onset of the green period, on the queue build-up and dissipation processes is also studied. Based on queue clearance time analysis for different traffic compositions, the possible erroneous estimate of green time length resulted from the existing adaptive signal control approaches is presented. Furthermore, the flow rate of vehicles discharging from a queue is examined and a passenger car unit (PCU) value of PTW is computed. Finally, an effective green time allocation technique is devised to integrate PTWs in ASC signal plans. Simulation results show that the proposed technique leads to a promising improvement. For the study, a macroscopic model designed to capture the traffic dynamics of mixed traffic flow consisting of PTWs and cars is employed. c © 2016 The Authors. Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the International Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems in Theory and Practice.