Development and Testing of Priority Control System in Connected Vehicle Environment

Abstract

Traffic signals provide service for multiple modes of travelers including vehicles, trucks, transit, pedestrians, bicycles, and emergency vehicles. Past research and experience have demonstrated the benefits of providing traffic signal priority for individual modes such as transit, emergency vehicles, and trucks. However, the priority treatment for each travel mode was addressed independently within the normal traffic signal operation. With the advancement of the wireless communication technologies, the global positioning system, and the development of the vehicle to vehicle (v2v) and vehicle to infrastructure (v2i) systems, called Connected Vehicles (CV), there is an opportunity to simultaneously identify and prioritize multiple vehicle requests for priority service. This paper addresses a decision framework for prioritizing requests for service from multiple modes within an integrated traffic signal control framework. The framework has been developed and tested using a microscopic hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) environment based on VISSIM and field tested and demonstrated in a live network of six intersections in Anthem, Arizona. The successful demonstration shows that the potential for safer and more efficient multi-modal traffic signal operations is highly possible.