Assessing the Potential Impacts of Connected Vehicles: Mobility,Environmental, and Safety Perspectives

The connected vehicle is a rapidly emerging paradigm aimed at deploying and developing a fully connected transportation system that enables data exchange among vehicles, infrastructure, and mobile devices to improve mobility, enhance safety, and reduce the adverse environmental impacts of the transportation systems. This study focuses on micromodeling and quantitatively assessing the potential impacts of the connected vehicle (CV) on mobility, safety, and the environment. To assess the benefits of CVs, a modeling framework is developed based on traffic microsimulation for a real network located in the city of Toronto, Canada, to mimic communication between enabled vehicles. In this study, we examine the effects of providing real-time routing guidance and advisory warning messages to CVs. In addition, to take into account the rerouting in nonconnected vehicles (non-CVs) in response to varying sources of information such as apps, global positioning systems (GPS), variable message signs (VMS), or simply seeing the traffic back up, the impact of fraction of non-CV vehicles was also considered and evaluated. Therefore, vehicles in this model are divided into; uninformed/unfamiliar not connected (non-CV), informed/familiar but not connected (non-CV) that get updates infrequently every 5 minutes or so (non-CV), and connected vehicles that receive information more frequently (CV). The results demonstrate the potential of connected vehicles to improve mobility, enhance safety, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) at the network-wide level. The results also show quantitatively how the market penetration of connected vehicles proportionally affects the performance of the traffic network. While the presented results are pertinent to the specifics of the road network modeled and cannot be generalized, the quantitative figures provide researchers and practitioners with ideas of what to expect from vehicle connectivity concerning mobility, safety, and environmental improvements.     

Microscopic modeling of large‐scale pedestrian–vehicle conflicts in the city of Madinah,Saudi Arabia

This paper presents a micro‐simulation modeling framework for evaluating pedestrian–vehicle conflicts in crowded crossing areas. The framework adopts a simulation approach that models vehicles and pedestrians at the microscopic level while satisfying two sets of constraints: (1) flow constraints and (2) non‐collision constraints. Pedestrians move across two‐directional cells as opposed to one‐dimensional lanes as in the case of vehicles; therefore, extra caution is considered when modeling the shared space between vehicles and pedestrians. The framework is used to assess large‐scale pedestrian–vehicle conflicts in a highly congested ring road in the City of Madinah that carries 20 000 vehicles/hour and crossed by 140 000 pedestrians/hour after a major congregational prayer. The quantitative and visual results of the simulation exhibits serious conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, resulting in considerable delays for pedestrians crossing the road (9 minutes average delay) and slow traffic conditions (average speed <10 km/hour). The model is then used to evaluate the following three mitigating strategies: (1) pedestrian‐only phase; (2) grade separation; and (3) pedestrian mall. A matrix of operational measures of effectiveness for network‐wide performance (e.g., average travel time, average speed) and for pedestrian‐specific performance (e.g., mean speed, mean density, mean delay, mean moving time) is used to assess the effectiveness of the proposed strategies. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Machine learning for multi-jurisdictional optimal traffic corridor control

Urban traffic corridors are often controlled by more than one agency. Typically in North America, a state of provincial transportation department controls freeways while another agency at the municipal or city level controls the nearby arterials. While the different segments of the corridor fall under different jurisdictions, traffic and users know no boundaries and expect seamless service. Common lack of coordination amongst those authorities due to lack of means for information exchange and/or possible bureaucratic ‘institutional grid-lock’ could hinder the full potential of technically-possible integrated control. Such institutional gridlock and related lack of timely coordination amongst the different agencies involved can have a direct impact on traffic gridlock. One potential solution to this problem is through integrated automatic control under intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Advancements in ITS and communication technology have the potential to considerably reduce delay and congestion through an array of network-wide traffic control and management strategies that can seamlessly cross-jurisdictional boundaries. Perhaps two of the most promising such control tools for freeway corridors are traffic-responsive ramp metering and/or dynamic traffic diversion possibly using variable message signs (VMS). Technically, the use of these control methods separately might limit their potential usefulness. Therefore, integrated corridor control using ramp metering and VMS diversion simultaneously might be synergetic and beneficial. Motivated by the above problem and potential solution approach, the aim of the research presented in this paper is to develop a self-learning adaptive integrated freeway-arterial corridor control for both recurring and non-recurring congestion. The paper introduces the use of reinforcement learning, an Artificial Intelligence method for machine learning, to provide optimal control using ramp metering and VMS routing in an integrated agent for a freeway-arterial corridor. Reinforcement learning is an approach whereby the control agent directly learns optimal strategies via feedback reward signals from its environment. A simple but powerful reinforcement learning method known as Q-learning is used. Results from an elaborate simulation study on a key corridor in Toronto are very encouraging and discussed in the paper.     

Design of Reinforcement Learning Parameters for Seamless Application of Adaptive Traffic Signal Control

Adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) is a promising technique to alleviate traffic congestion. This article focuses on the development of an adaptive traffic signal control system using Reinforcement Learning (RL) as one of the efficient approaches to solve such stochastic closed loop optimal control problem. A generic RL control engine is developed and applied to a multi-phase traffic signal at an isolated intersection in Downtown Toronto in a simulation environment. Paramics, a microscopic simulation platform, is used to train and evaluate the adaptive traffic control system. This article investigates the following dimensions of the control problem: 1) RL learning methods, 2) traffic state representations, 3) action selection methods, 4) traffic signal phasing schemes, 5) reward definitions, and 6) variability of flow arrivals to the intersection. The system was tested on three networks (i.e., small, medium, large-scale) to ensure seamless transferability of the system design and results. The RL controller is benchmarked against optimized pretimed control and actuated control. The RL-based controller saves 48% average vehicle delay when compared to optimized pretimed controller and fully-actuated controller. In addition, the effect of the best design of RL-based ATSC system is tested on a large-scale application of 59 intersections in downtown Toronto and the results are compared versus the base case scenario of signal control systems in the field which are mix of pretimed and actuated controllers. The RL-based ATSC results in the following savings: average delay (27%), queue length (28%), and l CO₂ emission factors (28%).