An Adaptive Signal Control Scheme to Prevent Intersection Traffic Blockage

In this paper, we present an adaptive signal control scheme to prevent intersection traffic blockage resulted from vehicle queue spillover. A method to identify vehicle queue spillover condition through simplified shockwave analysis is developed. Instead of measuring the vehicle queue length or locating the end of queue directly, this method relies on the vehicle speed which is more feasible to measure in practice. The adaptive traffic signal control scheme is designed to prevent potential intersection traffic blockage, and adaptively allocates green time to appropriate signal phases. At the end, a simulation study is carried out to evaluate the proposed adaptive control scheme. The results show that the scheme can effectively prevent intersection traffic blockage and significantly improve the performance of the intersection in terms of vehicle delay.