# A Carbon Benefits-Based Signal Control Method in a Connected Environment
## 1 Introduction
Vehicles lacking autonomous driving functionality may struggle to adhere to speed guidance, resulting in low compliance rates (CRs) and potentially diminishing the benefits of coordinating with signal plans. Therefore, it is critical to enhance the CR of vehicles by following speed guidance. With significant international attention focused on promoting public low-carbon actions, many countries are seeking measures to influence and encourage people to participate in reducing carbon emissions. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report indicates that changing people's behaviors could reduce carbon emissions by 40-70% by 2050 [31]. To achieve this goal, China has proposed the Carbon Inclusion Mechanism (CIM). CIM facilitates the exchange of green behavior data among the public, enterprises, and the government [32]. By establishing personal green assets and green credits, the carbon reduction benefits generated by individual low-carbon behaviors can be acquired by enterprises in need. This transforms individual low-carbon actions from purely altruistic behaviors into rewardable actions, significantly increasing the likelihood of individuals choosing low-carbon behaviors. On a theoretical level, scholars [33] have demonstrated the potential of CIM to synergize with intelligent transportation system (ITS), advocating it as a feasible pathway for optimizing transportation structures, promoting shifts in travel modes, and ultimately achieving emission reductions in the transportation sector [34]. Empirical research has also confirmed CIM's significant effectiveness in promoting green tourism [35; 36; 37]. For example, in Beijing, the \"Personal Carbon Ledger\" project has successfully encouraged over 88 million emission reduction actions, resulting in approximately 40,000 tons of carbon reductions [38]. This demonstrates that CIM measures have the potential to enhance public participation in green behaviors. Inspired by these theoretical and practical insights, we propose that CIM can effectively improve vehicle compliance with target speeds. Adhering to eco-speed guidance strategies recommended by signal control systems is essentially practicing green, low-carbon driving behavior. In a connected environment, the emission reduction benefits of such behaviors can be quantified by the control center. The obtainedemission reduction benefits can be used for carbon trading, with the transaction price serving as a carbon reward for the vehicle's green behavior. This integration of CIM with traffic control strategies can incentivize vehicles to comply with speed guidance. However, there is a notable lack of exploration in combining CIM with traffic signal control methods. Therefore, developing and integrating CIM to enhance signal control methods for reducing emissions is urgently needed. Given the research gap in the existing methods, this paper proposes an enhanced signal control method in a connected environment. It has the following features:  
* Higher ceiling of carbon emissions reduction at signal control intersection;
* Ensured higher CR of vehicles by taking advantage of carbon economic incentives;
* Provided a method for calculating carbon emissions reduction at the intersection. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the control mechanism. Section 3 presents the problem description. Section 4 presents the methodology. Section 5 evaluates the performance of the proposed method. Section 6 provides the conclusions.