Impact of Traffic Information Feedback Strategies on Signalized Two-Route Traffic Systems

The existing traffic information feedback strategies were originally proposed and evaluated for the two-route traffic systems without signal lights. However, traffic flow in urban traffic systems is rather complicated largely due to the presence of traffic signals. By introducing the signalized two-route traffic systems, this paper has investigated the eleven traffic information feedback strategies from system and user aspects for the first time, based on a set of two-route scenarios which simulate various combinations of traffic signal timing and location. The experimental results reveal the following findings. None of the test strategies can effectively improve road capacity for the scenarios where traffic lights are installed on both routes. The traffic information feedback strategies which use global information can reduce travel time to varying degrees, when dynamic vehicles become dominant on the roads. Furthermore, the eleven information feedback strategies have also been examined from the user equilibrium aspect and the corresponding results imply three congestion-based strategies can better approximate the user equilibrium as compared to the others. Finally, experiments demonstrate that the most inefficient strategy to achieve system optimality is the travel time feedback strategy.