Assessment of Pre-Preemption Strategy of Traffic Signals near Railroad Grade Crossing Utilizing Simulation Analysis

The current railroad crossing preemptions consider only safety issues involving train-vehicle crashes and allow the abbreviation of the vehicular minimum green time and shortening/omitting of the pedestrian “WALK” and flashing “DO NOT WALK” intervals. A few strategies in advance of the preemption were applied in previous studies to avoid the minimum green time abbreviations, as well as to improve mobility performance. However, those studies require the installation of infrastructure point detectors to predict train arrival and also provide extra green times for the non-dwell phases without considering the actual delays. This paper proposes to detect train arrival by utilizing the preemption activations and deactivations at the upstream intersections along the train’s path. Such a strategy is particularly feasible if a central signal control software can receive the notices of preemption activations and deactivations from the local controllers. Based on this type of train detection technology, the feasibility of various pre-preemption strategies was investigated in this paper using simulation analyses. Four out of thirteen pre-preemption strategies avoided minimum green time abbreviation in the tested scenarios. The Improved Transition Preemption Strategy (ITPS) was found to perform the best in terms of reducing average intersection delays.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB60 Highway/Rail Grade Crossings.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Chen, Xuanwu
  • Xiao, Yan
  • Hadi, Mohammed
  • Ackert, Melissa
  • Lin, Pei-Sung
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Green interval (Traffic signal cycle); Railroad grade crossings; Simulation; Traffic delays; Traffic signal control systems; Traffic signal preemption; Traffic signals
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Railroads; I73: Traffic Control;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01506675
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-5612
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 7 2014 11:53AM