Transit Signal Priority Enabling Connected and Automated Buses to Cut Through Traffic

This research proposes a TSPcut controller that enables connected and automated buses to cut through traffic to make TSP green light. The proposed controller overcomes the shortcomings of conventional TSP strategies and is able to: 1) overtake slowing moving vehicles in order to catch TSP green time; 2) decide the best time to pass the intersection; 3) considering the stochasticity of surrounding traffic; and 4) functional under partially connected and automated environment. It takes full advantage of connected vehicle technology by taking in real-time vehicle and infrastructure information as optimization input. The problem is formulated as an SMPC problem and is solved by a high-efficient dynamic programming algorithm. The nonlinear bicycle model is adopted as the system dynamics to realize CAV bus’s lane-changing and overtaking function. The stochasticity of surrounding traffic is considered as a probability distribution which is transformed into a linear chance constraint. Simulation evaluation is conduct to compare the TSPcut against NTSP, CTSP and BocTSP. Sensitive analysis is conducted for congestion levels. The evaluation results demonstrate that the TSPcut improves the bus delay reduction by 17.9%–49.1%, and the benefits are 3.5% to 16.1% greater than that of other TSP systems. The range is caused by different congestion levels. In addition. Further tests are conducted to analyze how CAV bus’s arrival time and the speed of background traffic influence the performance of the TSPcut.