The role of online urban signal control in congestion and incident detection and management

COSMOS (congestion management strategies and methods in urban sites) is one of the European Commission´s ATT projects in the 4th Framework Programme of Research. The COSMOS project will develop, validate and demonstrate new procedures for reducing and, where possible, preventing congestion caused by incidents and oversaturation in densely trafficked urban areas. These procedures comprise: enhanced algorithms for automatic incident and congestion detection (ACID), special modules for congestion and incident management (CIM) which can be included in any online network signal control systems, and strategies for rerouteing traffic to make the best use out of the capacity at junctions and in the links between them. In the next step, the general principles for CIM strategies were to be elaborated. These principles take account of both the possibilities of urban signal control and the restrictions set by the ACID systems and by the demands of other UTC systems. Based on these general principles, a set of detailed control strategies for specific congestion and incident scenarios is now under development, and are described further in this paper. This common development will branch out into the specification of algorithms and the building of three separate demonstrators for SCOOT, MOTION and UTOPIA. In parallel, rerouteing strategies will be prepared for the implementation in the test sites