Real-time traffic control for sustainable urban living

Traffic congestion significantly degrades the quality of life in urban environments. It results in lost time, wasted fuel resources and reduced air quality for urban residents. Recent work in real-time, schedule-driven control of traffic signal networks has introduced new possibilities for reducing congestion in urban environments. However so far, this work has focused mainly on achieving more efficient vehicle flows and on reducing emissions, and the broader mobility of other modes of traffic that are central to sustainable urban living - especially pedestrians - has not been emphasized in an integrated way. In this paper, we extend this decentralized, schedule-driven approach to traffic network control in the direction of this broader mobility objective. We focus specifically on accommodating pedestrians and optimizing the delay tradeoffs between vehicles and pedestrians. Three basic extensions are introduced and evaluated on a real-world road network. Simulation results are first presented which analyze the ability of the extended approach to achieve good delay tradeoffs under different pedestrian traffic conditions. Tests are then performed in the field at selected intersections of the target road network, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in operation.