Eco-Approach and Departure (EAD) Application for Actuated Signals in Real-World Traffic

The connected vehicle eco-approach and departure (EAD) application for signalized intersections has been widely studied and is deemed to be effective in terms of reducing energy consumption and both greenhouse gas and other criteria pollutant emissions. Prior studies have shown that tangible environmental benefits can be gained by communicating the driver with the signal phase and timing (SPaT) information of the upcoming traffic signals with fixed time control to the driver. However, similar applications to actuated signals pose a significant challenge due to their randomness to some extent caused by vehicle actuation. Based on the framework previously developed by the authors, a real-world testing has been conducted along the El Camino Real corridor in Palo Alto, CA, USA, to evaluate the system performance in terms of energy savings and emissions reduction. Strategies and algorithms are designed to be adaptive to the dynamic uncertainty for actuated signal and real-world traffic. It turns out that the proposed EAD system can save 6% energy for the trip segments when activated within DSRC ranges and 2% energy for all trips. The proposed system can also reduce 7% of CO, 18% of HC, and 13% of NOx for all trips. Those results are compatible with the simulation results and validate the previously developed EAD framework.