The Benefits of Signal Group Oriented Control

There are many different traffic light control algorithms. They can be roughly classified as fixed time, vehicle actuated or traffic responsive. All of these control algorithms have stages, blocks or similar concepts at their basis that impede flexibility. This paper will therefore present a signal group oriented algorithm that is not bound by any constraints. This means that any combination of signal groups that is allowed by the conflict matrix can be actuated in any order. To isolate the effects of shifting to signal group oriented control, this paper tests a version of the same control algorithm that does respect stages and stage orders. These tests revealed that the overall time lost for all vehicles can be reduced by up to 21% by switching to signal group oriented control.