Analysis of the impact of detector accuracy on fully-actuated traffic signal control

Abstract

This paper aims to quantify the impact of detector accuracy on fully-actuated traffic signal control. The study data is collected from the city of Huai’an and a simulation study is conducted using VISSIM. A fully-actuated traffic signal control is replicated in the simulation, and detector inaccuracies are simulated across multiple scenarios for analysis and comparison. Finally, the average vehicle delay, queue length, and number of stops output from the simulation experiment are compared and analyzed. The experimental simulation results indicate that when the detection accuracy reaches 70% and above, the performance of the fullyactuated traffic signal control is acceptable, and when the accuracy level is greater than 90%, the performance is basically the same as the 100% accuracy. In addition, it is found that traffic volume has a strong impact on the effect of detector accuracy and then on the performance of signal controller. In particular, the effect of detector accuracy on the optimal operation of the signal is most pronounced in the scenarios with lower traffic volume. Sites with low traffic volume require special attention to the accuracy of the detectors used. On the other hand, as the traffic volume increases, the impact of the detection accuracy on the performance of fully-actuated controllers is less significant as there are more chances to trigger the detectors.