Study and Evaluation of IntelliDrive Technology for Traffic Responsive Control Strategies

IntelliDrive is an initiative developed by United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) that aims to enable safe, interoperable networked wireless communications among vehicles, the infrastructure, and passengers' personal communications devices. IntelliDrive technology has the ability to provide data that would be helpful in enhancement of the existing traffic management applications. IntelliDrive data has attributes that cannot be measured using traditional surveillance technology and which can be used for the development of new traffic management and traveler information applications. The traffic responsive plan selection (TRPS) mode of operation is used in coordinated traffic network to improve the performance of the system. This mode of operation has the ability to implement the best possible timing plan for the existing traffic conditions by switching between timing plans. The data from IntelliDrive technology can be utilized in the traffic responsive mode to improve the system performance by reducing the overall delay in the system. This paper proposes a system that can be used to integrate the data obtained from the IntelliDrive technology to the traffic responsive mode of operation. The proposed method utilizes the number of stops and delay of the vehicles in an intersection as a basis for the implementation of the best timing plan for the prevailing traffic condition. The study shows that using the IntelliDrive based TRPS results in the selection of the traffic plan that minimizes the delay of the system and thus results in better system performance compared to the traditional traffic responsive mechanism.