FMAA: A Flexible Signal Timing Method for An Isolated Intersection with Conflicting Traffic Flows

Optimizing traffic signal timing can effectively alleviate urban traffic congestion. However, most of the existing signal timing methods struggle to deal with conflicting traffic flows in heavy traffic; therefore, more effective methods are urgently required. In this paper, we propose a flexible signal timing method that combines all-red control and adaptive timing (FMAA) to deal with conflicting traffic flows at an isolated intersection. First, we consider a Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication-based vehicular network environment, in which fine-grained traffic information can be collected by Road Side Units (RSUs) and uploaded to a cloud server for designing signal timing methods. Second, the congestion degree of Conflict Area (CA) is defined and utilized to trigger all-red control in congested cases. Third, the tolerance degree of the Waiting Area (WA) is defined and utilized to perform adaptive timing in other cases. Finally, simulations were conducted using SUMO, and the proposed FMAA method performed better than the comparative methods in terms of average speed, waiting time, and congested vehicles, thus improving traffic efficiency at an isolated intersection with conflicting traffic flows.