Modeling urban traffic control systems from the perspective of real time calculus

This work presents a new framework for urban traffic flow control based on the real time calculus (RTC) method. The queuing behavior of the traffic flow is transformed into an arrival curve, and the capacity of the intersection is characterized by a service curve. According to different signal control strategies, the service and arrival curves at an intersection are used to calculate the outgoing arrival curve. This result curve at each intersection is further integrated with the curves at the adjacent intersections, which finally exhibits the RTC model of the whole traffic network. The presented model can evaluate the bounds of the delay D of a vehicle and the backlog B of an intersection. The experiments are settled on the urban girds, and reveal the changing trend of the congestion factors D and B that are under fixed-time and adapted control strategies respectively. This is followed by a discussion of how this modeling method helps to estimate the effect of different signal control strategies.