An Approach Towards the Integration of Bus Priority, Traffic Adaptive Signal Control, and Bus Information/Scheduling Systems

This paper addresses the integration of adaptive traffic signal control and bus priority. In bus priority, several possible approaches are used for giving more “weight” to the buses: (1) passive priority, when signal timings are set, ahead of time, so that buses incur less delays, (2) active priority, where buses are detected at approaches to the intersection and phase splits are adjusted to accommodate the bus, and (3) “optimization-based” priority where the current state of the system is estimated and the signals are changed as per active priority schemes. Our work is related to the last approach where the signals are set based on real-time optimization of the phasing that considers all the vehicles on the network, the passenger counts in the buses, and the schedule status of the buses.