Development of Signal Operations Research Laboratory for Testing and Development of Advanced Control Strategies, Phase 1

A virtual intersection environment consisting of a new microscopic traffic simulator and a 2070 traffic controller was developed to provide a platform for a realistic pseudo real-time evaluation of intersection control strategies. The new simulator is based on an object-oriented modeling approach. In particular, the interface between the simulator and the traffic controller was developed using a commonly available digital input/output card and the Windows NT registry. Further, a signal converter was also developed to transform the format of the emulated detector data from the simulation model into the data format acceptable by the traffic controller. The implementation of the intersection control strategies into the 2070 controller was performed using the field I/O manager module provided by the City of Los Angeles DOT. The resulting Hardware-in-loop simulation system was applied to evaluate different control strategies for an intersection, i.e., pre-timed, actuated and adaptive methods.