Advancing the white phase mobile traffic control paradigm to consider pedestrians

Abstract

Current literature on joint optimization of intersection signal timing and connected automated vehicle (CAV) trajectory mostly focuses on vehicular movements paying no or little attention to pedestrians. This paper presents a methodology to safely incorporate pedestrians into signalized intersections with CAVs and connected human‐driven vehicles (CHVs). The movements of vehicles are controlled using both traffic lights and mobile CAV controllers during our newly introduced “white phase.” CAVs navigate platoons of CHVs through the intersection when the white phases are active. In addition to optimizing CAV trajectories, the model optimally selects the status of the traffic light signal among white and green indications for vehicular and walk and do‐not‐walk intervals for pedestrian movements. A receding horizon‐based methodology is used to capture the stochastic nature of the problem and to reduce computational complexity. The case study results show the successful operation of fleets consisting of pedestrians, CAVs, and CHVs with various demand levels through isolated intersections. The results also show that increasing the CAV market penetration rate (MPR) can decrease average intersection delay by up to 27%. Moreover, the average pedestrian, CHV, and CAV delays decrease as the CAV MPR increases and reach their minimum values with a fully CAV fleet. In addition, the presence of the white phase can decrease the intersection average delay by up to 14.7%.

Integrated corridor management by cooperative traffic signal and ramp metering control

“…Wang et al, 2018), and spider monkey algorithm (Akhand et al, 2020) can be implemented as well to reduce run times by compromising solution quality. Apart from these, recent research on mixed traffic with Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) has brought innovative traffic control plans (Niroumand et al, 2020b(Niroumand et al, , 2021(Niroumand et al, , 2024 and discusses complex cooperative driving behaviors (Rios-Torres & Malikopoulos, 2017). Integrating such innovative frameworks into Integrated corridor management is worth exploring further.…”