AN APPROACH TOWARDS THE INTEGRATION OF BUS PRIORITY AND TRAFFIC ADAPTIVE SIGNAL CONTROL

Abstract

This paper addresses the integration of adaptive traffic signal control and bus priority. When one refers to bus priority, several possible approaches are used for giving more weight to the buses: (1) passive priority, when signal timings are set, ahead of time, so that buses incur fewer delays, (2) active priority, where buses are detected at approaches to the intersection and phases are extended started early, added or omitted to accommodate the bus, and (3) optimization-based priority where the current state of the system is estimated and the signals are changed as per active priority schemes. The work reported here is related to last approach where the signals are set based on real-time optimization of the phasing that considers all the vehicles on the network, as well as the buses, the passenger counts in the buses, and the schedule status (is the bus late, on time, early, etc.) of the buses. The architecture for phase optimization is based on the RHODES traffic adaptive signal control system developed at the University of Arizona