Development and Testing of a Demand-Responsive Strategy for Traffic Signal Control

Traffic signal control in urban areas has a major impact on the performance of the transportation network. Existing computer-based traffic control systems are mostly of the First Generation type, i.e., they implement control strategies that were calculated off-line based on historical traffic flow information. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to develop and test demand-responsive traffic control strategies that can be implemented in real-time. Three different computer programs were developed: (1) A Dynamic Programing based program; (2) A heuristic search procedure; and (3) A rolling horizon strategy that is suitable for real-time implementation.