A STOCHASTIC MODELLING APPROACH TO ACTUATED CONTROLS

This paper proposes a method to estimate the distribution of travel times at actuated signals by computing the probability distribution of green times and the eventual overflow queues, which may occur in saturated conditions. This method enables one to analyse the stochastic and dynamic character of travel times at such signals. Due to the required elaborate computations, this methodology can be applied in two ways: it can be used to derive approximate formulas of expected green times and queue lengths and their standard deviation, or it can be used to validate existing formulas.The results on a toy scenario show that actuated controls work well only when the flows approaching the intersection are small, while a large overflow queue can occur in oversaturated conditions.