Copyright © 2012 Lv Bin. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Transit signal priority (TSP) is recognized as having the potential to improve transit service reliability at small cost to general traffic. The popular preference for TSP encounters the challenges of various and challenging test scenarios. According to the stochastic characteristics of traffic flow, the signal timing model was established for TSP at an isolated signal intersection, where the passenger average delay was used as the optimization objective, and the weights of all phases were considered. The priority logic that is considered in the study provides cycle length and green time within a fixed-time traffic signal control environment. Using the Gauss elimination, the quantitative relationships were determined between phase clearance reliability (PCR), cycle length, and green time. Simulation experiments conducted by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm indicated that (1) the random variation of arrival rate has an obvious effect on traffic signal settings; (2) the proposed TSP model can reduce passenger delays, especially under stochastic traffic flow.