Optimizing Traffic Signal Timings for Mega Events

Most approaches for optimizing traffic signal timings deal with the daily traffic. However, there are a few occasional events like football matches or concerts of musicians that lead to exceptional traffic situations. Still, such events occur more or less regularly and place and time are known in advance. Hence, it is possible to anticipate such events with special signal timings. In this paper, we present an extension of a cyclically time-expanded network flow model and a corresponding mixed-integer linear programming formulation for simultaneously optimizing traffic signal timings and traffic assignment for such events. Besides the mathematical analysis of this approach, we demonstrate its capabilities by computing signal timings for a real world scenario