Semi-actuated arterial coordination for traffic control: A practical method

Arterial coordination is a common method in urban traffic control. Traditional arterial coordination methods are usually off-line control methods based on mixed-integer linear program. These methods cannot adapt to changes of traffic flow, for instance, although there are very few cars in a branch road, timing plan will not adjust. Thus, we proposed a semi-actuated arterial coordination method which is a combination of practical actuated traffic control and traditional arterial coordination control. Five adjacent intersections of Huanghe Second Road in Binzhou City, Shandong Province, China are selected to test our method. We use microscopic traffic simulation software Q-PARAMICS to simulate and simulation results show that semi-actuated arterial coordination can effectively improve the performance index.