pedMP: A Novel Pedestrian-Friendly Max Pressure Traffic Controller
Max-pressure traffic signal control has 3 key features: maximum network level throughput, stability, and decentralization. The stability property allows researchers to design traffic scenarios and find a realistic upper bound for vehicle demand, and decentralization allows for individual intersection controllers to work independently. City engineers have suggested that decentralized methods are much easier to install. A gap in the literature suggests that pedestrian waiting time at crosswalks needs to be considered in traffic control. Previous works have considered pedestrian wait times in a fully autonomous vehicle environment, but not in a mixed or traditional vehicle environment. This paper revises the original max-pressure control to include a pedestrian tolerance time constraint. The max-pressure control must activate a crosswalk if a pedestrian has been waiting for longer than the tolerance time. Within those constraints, I implement a modified max-pressure control and create a modular codebase that can be used to run network-level simulations. The codebase is useful for running simulations of various pedestrian and vehicle demand scenarios over time.