Public Transport Priority for Multimodal Urban Traffic Control

In order to improve the travel time of surface public transport vehicles (bus, tramway, etc.), several cities use Urban Traffic Control (UTC) systems enabling to give priority to public transport. This paper reviews these systems. Further on after a debate on their insufficiencies in the global regulation of the urban traffic on a whole network, the paper proposes intermodal regulation strategies, operating on intersection traffic lights to regulate the traffic, favouring the public transport. All these strategies are based on the Linear Quadratic (LQ) optimal control theory, but they are different in their ways of taking into account the public transport in the optimization problem. The simulation tests are carried out in a network of eight intersections and two public transport lines.