Visualizing Vehicle Acceleration and Braking Energy at Intersections along a Major Traffic Corridor

Conference · Tue Jun 01 04:00:00 EDT 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3447555.3466603· OSTI ID:1813183

Xu, Haowen ^[1]; Berres, Andy ^[1]; Wang, Ross ^[1]; Laclair, Tim ^[1]; Sanyal, Jibo ^[1]

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1. ORNL

Automobiles approaching a controlled intersection need to brake and come to a full stop when the signal transitions from green to red, and the vehicle must later accelerate to normal speeds after the signal changes back to green. These stops and starts associated with normal signal changes lead to unnecessary energy consumption and vehicle emissions. Previous studies have revealed that the optimization of traffic intersections' signal controls and coordination facilitates smoother traffic flows with reduced stop-and-go driving, which can significantly reduce traffic congestion and unnecessary fuel waste. This paper presents an interactive visual analytics dashboard that allows transportation planners to explore and analyze energy consumption patterns resulting from temporally varying traffic signal phases at multiple intersections along a major transportation corridor using traffic simulation outputs. The visual dashboard is implemented as an accessible and responsive web application and employs a combination of visualization techniques to cover multiple aspects of vehicle acceleration and braking at multiple adjacent intersections along a corridor. The paper presents a case study of a simulated traffic scenario on the Shallowford Road traffic corridor located in Chattanooga, Tennessee to demonstrate the capability of the visual dashboard.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1813183
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English