Capacity optimization of an isolated intersection under the phase swap sorting strategy

It is well recognized that the left turn reduces the intersection capacity significantly, because some of the traffic lanes cannot be used to discharge vehicles during its green phases. In this paper, we operationalize the phase swap sorting strategy (Xuan, 2011) to use most, if not all, traffic lanes to discharge vehicles at the intersection cross-section to increase its capacity. We explicitly take into consideration all through, left- and right-turning movements on all arms and formulate the capacity maximization problem as a Binary-Mixed-Integer-Linear-Programming (BMILP) model. The model is efficiently solved by standard branch-and-bound algorithms and outputs optimal signal timings, lane allocations, and other decisions. Numerical experiments show that substantially higher reserve capacity can be obtained under our approach. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.