Robust signal timing for arterials under day-to-day demand variations

This paper formulates a scenario-based stochastic programming model to optimize the timing of pretimed signals along arterials under day-to-day demand variations or future uncertain traffic growth. Demand scenarios and their corresponding probabilities of occurrence are introduced to represent the demand uncertainty. On the basis of a cell-transmission representation of traffic dynamics, cycle length, green splits, phase sequences, and offsets are determined to minimize the expected delay incurred by high-consequence demand scenarios. A simulation-based genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the model, and a numerical example is presented to verify and validate the model.