EditorialTraffic control and management-recent methodological advancesIn October 2010, a special issue on "Recent Advances in Traffic Control and Management" was published in the Journal of Advanced Transportation [1]. In past years, great strides have been made continuously in traffic control and management for alleviation of traffic congestion in urban areas [2][3][4][5]. New approaches have been developed to augment and improve existing ones, or to seek new modeling paradigms for mixed traffic or heterogeneous vehicles in urban areas [6,7]. It is timely to take inventory of what we have developed in recent years and provide a preview of what lies ahead for further research on this important topic.Traffic control and management are generally considered as economically, financially, and environmentally sustainable measures for alleviation of traffic congestion in major cities. Promoting traffic control and management has long been one of the top priorities for both developed and developing countries. The performance of traffic control and management is usually evaluated in terms of a number of important attributes such as cost, time, reliability, safety and emission, ranging from a more localized perspective of "efficiency" to a wider perspective of "effectiveness". An effective and efficient traffic control and management system benefits a society at large by reducing fuel consumption, preserving the environment, fostering development, reducing traffic congestion, and improving safety. However, various impacts of traffic control and management measures are difficult to be quantified [8]. This special issue is aimed to cover some recent methodological advances in traffic control and management. Seven papers are collected in this special issue, as summarized in the paragraphs that follow.Ren et al. propose an integrated model for determining flows on emergency evacuation routes and traffic signals at intersections when the background travel demands are uncertain under evacuation condition. They adopt a bi-objective bi-level programming approach to optimize traffic signal system, subject to various restraints; the upper-level sub-program seeks to minimize the total travel time of evacuation flows and performance index of the whole network, whereas the lower-level sub-program is a logit-based stochastic user equilibrium assignment model with background demand constraint. A heuristic solution method based on Genetic Algorithm is used to solve the bi-level program. A case study on the Jianye network around the Nanjing Olympics Sports Center in Nanjing, China, shows the applicability of the proposed model and solution method.Yao investigates the impacts of short left-turn lanes on isolated signalized intersections and proposes joint optimization models for optimizing the signal cycle length and the short left-lane length under different scenarios. Case study is carried out on the basis of the field data collected in Dalian, China, for assessing the impacts of the signal cycles and short left-turn lanes under differen...
