National Center for Sustainable Transportation

Surface transportation systems (e.g., arterial roadways with signalized intersections) are inherently inefficient, particularly at higher traffic volumes. In general, both the infrastructure (e.g., traffic signals) and the vehicles operate independently, with little coordination between them. Previous research has shown that implementing strategies that take advantage of infrastructure-tovehicle communication can improve overall mobility and reduce environmental impacts, e.g., the Eco-Approach and Departure (EAD) application that takes advantage of communicating signal phase and timing information to the vehicles. In this paper, the authors build upon this past research to develop a new cooperative traffic operation approach that takes advantage of not only infrastructure-to-vehicle communications, but also vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. This effort integrates a dynamic traffic signalization algorithm together with EAD algorithm to achieve even greater traffic efficiency. The research was carried out in a high-fidelity simulation environment and shows upwards of 15% fuel savings and 85% reductions in waiting time.

View the NCST Project Webpage