Performance analysis of max-pressure control system for traffic network using macroscopic fundamental diagram

Traffic signal control is known to improve performance and to reduce congestion of urban networks in traffic management. As a control system, the traffic signal control regulates vehicles through traffic lights to produce traffic conditions with maximum output, queue lengths dispersion and less travel time. Max pressure control is a widely known approach in the traffic management for controlling signalized intersections networks by only requiring information of queues adjacent to the intersection and does not call for knowledge of mean demands. Beside the simplicity of the approach, the formulation requires turning ratio information related to movement of vehicles entering and leaving links of the intersections and phase saturation flow. In practice, real time measurement of turning ratios is subjected to inaccuracies caused by sensor network limitations. Therefore, it is of interest to carry out performance analysis of max pressure control application due to inaccuracies of turning ratio information. The paper considers the max-pressure control performance analysis by means of macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) approach. The performance analysis is conducted on a traffic model of Bandung city, Indonesia consisting of five active signalized intersections. In which, four intersections are active signalized intersections that have two signal phases, and one intersection is an active signalized intersection that has three signal phases. The simulation results show the max-pressure control algorithm performs good performance based on the evaluation of the MFD diagram related to the density value and the maximum vehicle flow value produced. In addition, based on travel time graph evaluation, the max-pressure control is more adaptive in handling changes in the demand rate which increases drastically. The performance analysis of simulation results using MFD with the proposed critical velocity approach indicates the max pressure control is insensitive to turning ratio variations to some extent