Intelligent Traffic Control in a Connected Vehicle Environment

Signal control systems have experienced tremendous development both in hardware and in control strategies in the past 50 years since the advent of the first electronic traffic signal control device. The state-of-art real-time signal control strategies rely heavily on infrastructure-based sensors, including in-pavement or video based loop detectors for data collection. With the emergence of connected vehicle technology, mobility applications utilizing vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications enable the intersection to acquire a much more complete picture of the nearby vehicle states. Based on this new source of data, traffic controllers should be able to make “smarter” decisions. This dissertation investigates the traffic signal control strategies in a connected vehicle environment considering mobility as well as safety. A system architecture for connected vehicle based signal control applications under both a simulation environment and in the real world has been developed. The proposed architecture can be applied to applications such as adaptive signal control, signal priority including transit signal priority (TSP), freight signal priority (FSP), emergency vehicle preemption, and integration of adaptive signal control and signal priority. Within the framework, the trajectory awareness of connected vehicles component processes and stores the connected vehicle data from Basic Safety Message (BSM). A lane level intersection map that represents the geometric structure was developed. Combined with the map and vehicle information from BSMs, the connected vehicles can be located on the map. Some important questions specific to connected vehicle are