Passenger-oriented Distributed Traffic Signal Control Using Dynamic Programming with Vehicle Queue Spillback and Waiting Time Constraints

In a congested urban road network, it is important to reduce passenger travel time and delay by implementing appropriate traffic signal controls. Previous studies have mainly focused on vehicle travel times or queue lengths around signals. However, as ridesharing has become popular in recent years, a new line of research delves into prioritizing ridesharing vehicles in terms of convenience for people rather than for cars. This paper proposes a control method based on dynamic programming that reduces the passenger travel time in a distributed manner by taking into account the number of passengers in each vehicle. This method also alleviates vehicle spillback and extremely long wait times for vehicles. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is verified with simulations.