Abstract
In urban road network in Japan, a control area is divided into several sub-areas for the purpose of determining the signal timings. Each sub-area consists of a series of intersections with one critical intersection where traffic congestion sometimes takes place. Each sub-area is associated with a unique cycle length and the split of each intersection is calculated based on the cycle length. The conventional method is deficient in that the cycle length is characterized only by the critical intersection and other intersections in the sub-area are ignored. The paper proposes a new method of determining the optimal cycle length which minimizes the total delay time in the sub-area. In order to evaluate the validity of this approach, the experiments were carried out using a traffic flow simulator. These experiments showed that the method proposed in this paper decreases the queue length significantly, compared with the conventional method.
