Speed Advisory and Signal Offsets Control for Arterial Bandwidth Maximization and Energy Consumption Reduction

The problem of maximizing bandwidth along an arterial is addressed here by use of two combined control actions: traffic light offsets and recommended speeds. The optimization problem has been enriched in order to account for traffic energy consumption and network travel time, thus avoiding impractical or undesirable solutions. A traffic microscopic simulator has been used to assess the performance of the proposed technique in terms of energy consumption, travel time, idling time, and number of stops. The correlation of theoretical bandwidth with known traffic performance metrics is studied, and an analysis of the Pareto optimum has been carried out to help the designer choose a tradeoff in the multiobjective optimization. Finally, an evaluation of the traffic performance at different levels of traffic demand aims at showing the best operation conditions of the proposed strategy. A demand-dependent optimization is proposed.