A Collaborative Transit Signal Priority Method Considering Gaming among Traffic Participants

How to realize the game equilibrium between bus and nontransit vehicle is a hot topic in the field of transit signal priority (TSP). To this end, a collaborative transit signal priority (Co-TSP) method is proposed. The core of Co-TSP is a two-objective optimization problem which takes the expected delays of buses and the average delays of nontransit vehicles as the objectives. Different from previous studies, Co-TSP uses game theory to realize collaborative optimization, instead of transforming the problem into a single objective optimization problem by weighting. A finite state machine-based algorithm is developed to estimate the average delays of nontransit vehicles. The stochasticity of bus arrival time is also considered in the estimation of bus delays to improve the robustness. Candidate timing plans obtained by the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA) are divided into three priority levels based on the delays of buses. The final timing plans can be picked intuitively from the candidates by rules representing expert knowledge and demands to control the priority level. Co-TSP guarantees theoretically by preliminary screening that the expected delays of bus after optimization must be no higher than that before optimization. Simulation experiments are conducted in Shanghai, China, to verify the performance. Results show that Co-TSP reduces the delays of buses by 27.7%∼41.0% and still performs well under low and high congestion levels, while the conventional TSP (CTSP) fails in some cases. Priority control proves to be effective at last. The research provides a new idea for the benefit allocation among participants at intersections.