Impact and Deployment of Dynamic Traffic Light Control Strategies using a City-wide Simulation Scenari

Nowadays, the ever-increasing population and subsequently, the growing number of vehicles have created bottlenecks at road network intersections. Dynamic traffic lights are believed to improve the road traffic throughput by actively adapting signal programs to real-time traffic conditions. Such control mechanisms, however, are rarely easily deployed on a large-scale infrastructure, and the tools employed by the literature are generally based on overly simple or limited validation scenarios. In this paper, we use a city-scale simulation scenario to analyze the impact of dynamic traffic lights on both overall traffic and bus public transportation network. Unlike previous studies, we express a particular interest in the influence of dynamic traffic lights on public transportation. Indeed, a solution that improves the overall traffic conditions but disturbs public transportation services is of no interest to most cities that are currently paying more and more attention to them. Our simulation results show that dynamic traffic lights have a high positive impact on time efficiency and a moderate impact on emissions in both overall and public transportation traffic. The impact of dynamic traffic lights on traffic safety is non-conclusive. We also investigate different deployment strategies and show that equipping the 10% most visited signalized intersections with dynamic traffic lights represents a good trade-off between deployment complexity and performance in both networks.