Self-organizing traffic signal control with prioritization strategy aided by vehicular sensor network

Abstract

Preemption strategies are necessary for traffic signal control at intersections in a road network to ensure minimum delay of priority vehicles, such as ambulances or police cars. This paper introduces a decentralized algorithm, which extends the self-organizing signal control to provide preemption for the priority vehicles. The introduced algorithm enables effective utilisation of real-time data collected in vehicular sensor network (VSN). Results of simulation experiments show that the proposed approach ensures a quick passage of the priority vehicles and minimizes the negative effect of signal preemption on delays of non-priority vehicles. The new VSN-aided preemption strategy improves performance of the state-of-the-art methods that are based on road-side vehicle detectors and simple vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems.