V2X-based signal control – recent results from a field experiment

Peter Wagner
DLR Berlin, Germany

Abstract:
Traffic signal control in transportation systems is traditionally done by designing optimized fixed cycle programs. This is a challenging mathematical topic, however, simulation results show, that real-life influences have a strong potential towards destroying the foundations of this approach. Therefore, another approach which is sometimes called self-organized traffic signal control is currently tested in some places not only in simulation, but also in real field experiments where all the additional complexities of real-life come into play. The idea is to use a smart local control that is capable of taking into account the inhomogeneities present in the current traffic stream and to exploit them to a large degree to optimize not only locally, but as a side effect, to lead to some kind of global optimum. However, going into the real field is very much different from the often very abstract theoretical work with highly abstracted networks and vehicles. Unfortunately, the practical approach is currently severely limited to small implementations in the field consisting of just a few intersections; there is still a long way to go for large-scale real-life applications. This presentation will report on such a small-scale implementation in the German city of Halle. It will compare, depending on the progress of the project that is currently worked out, the differences between the simulation results and the results in the field. It will finally put this into the context of the theoretical work and it will give hints how to improve the theoretical work so that it becomes more useful for practical applications.