Urban transportation emissions mitigation: Coupling high-resolution vehicular emissions and traffic models for traffic signal optimization

This paper proposes a methodology that allows high-resolution traffic and emissions models, known as microscopic simulation models, to be efficiently used to address transportation optimization problems that account for complex environmental metrics. The methodology consists of a metamodel simulation-based optimization (SO) approach. The metamodel combines traffic and emissions information from high-resolution microscopic simulators with information from lower-resolution analytical macroscopic models. This paper formulates and uses an analytical and differentiable macroscopic approximation of the non-differentiable simulation-based microscopic emissions model. A differentiable macroscopic traffic model is also used.