Signal control optimization for urban traffic against incident-induced congestion

Traffic incidents result in remarkable congestion and delays. In order to help reduce the influence of incidents in urban traffic, this paper focuses on developing optimization strategies for intersection signal control against non-recurrent congestion. Based on sensor data as well as incident information, this paper proposes an integral procedure to decrease the total delays around the incident site, including quantifying incident-induced travel delays, designing a signal control optimization model and obtaining the optimal solution. The simulation results generated on VISSIM indicate that the proposed method leads to 39.5% decrease in delay, a remarkable improvement of under heavy flows situations.