LMP-BAND: A Linked Movement-Pair Progression Model for Urban Arterial Signal Coordination Control

Arterial signal coordination control aims at providing adequate right-of-way for the critical paths carrying predominant traffic demand, which is significant to guarantee the progression efficiency of arterials. In current models, the critical paths are usually predefined. However, the predefined critical paths may not be the ones most compatible with overall arterial progression efficiency, which may plunge the arterial progression efficiency into local optimum. To address this issue, the concept of Linked Movement-Pair (LMP), representing vehicular movements along two adjacent intersections, is introduced as a basic modeling unit of arterial coordination in this paper. Given OD (origin-destination) flow matrix of the arterial, an LMP-BAND model is proposed to maximize the weighted bandwidths of all LMPs in the target arterial. The signal timing and the combination of coordinated LMPs are optimized concurrently, realizing an interior critical path searching mechanism for optimal overall progression efficiency. A simulation case study was conducted on a five-intersection arterial under four different traffic demand scenarios, together with a comparison with MULTIBAND and Multi-path MAXBAND. Results showed that, in the scenario with heavy turning flows caused by high-volume critical paths, LMP-BAND outperformed the other two models by 8% to 16% in the average number of stops and 6% to 14% in the average delay, due to the precise capture of coordination demands that were compatible with overall performance. In two-way mainline traffic predominant scenarios, LMP-BAND performed better at both arterial-level and network-level by high-quality two-way progression bands and additional bands for diverging flows.