Carbon dioxide emission in a single-lane cellular automaton model with a series of traffic lights

In this paper, we propose a cellular automaton model to simulate traffic flow controlled by a series of traffic lights. The synchronized traffic light and the green wave light strategies were investigated. The spatiotemporal diagrams, energy dissipation, and CO2 emission of the system were presented. Our simulations are conducted to clarify the difference between both strategies and their effects on the traffic flow and the CO2 emission. We found that the traffic flow depends mainly on the strategy used for managing the traffic lights as well as on the parameters of the traffic lights, namely the cycle length, the number of traffic lights and the length of the system. The fundamental diagram has barely the same characteristics for both methods and it depends on the combination of the parameters of the system. We find that the green wave is more convenient for the management of a series of traffic lights than the synchronized control strategy in terms of throughput, especially for large-sized systems. Unlike in terms of CO2 emission and energy dissipation, both control strategies outperform each other depending on the density regions and the parameters of the system. Finally, we investigate the effect of both cycles (i.e. red and green) for the synchronized control method on the CO2 emission. It is found that the green cycle generates often a series of acceleration events that increase CO2 emission.