Actuated Traffic Signal Performance Evaluation along Arterials using Wi-Fi Travel Time Samples and High-Resolution Traffic Signal Events Data

Abstract

Understanding traffic progression on arterials is critical for traffic signal control and urban traffic management. Traffic conditions are highly dynamic and evolve over time. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the arterial’s performance periodically to determine how well a traffic signal system is functioning. Arterial performance is conventionally evaluated based on travel time/speed collected via the probe vehicles. New approaches based on high-resolution traffic signal events have been proposed by a group at Purdue University, based on the Purdue Coordination Diagrams (PCDs). Both traditional arterial travel times/speeds and the PCDs can effectively reflect the level of traffic progression on arterials, while some practical questions have been raised about how to synthesize these two methods. The framework proposed in this paper integrates two types of performance measures by defining new multi-intersection coordination diagrams to examine traffic signal performance. The multi-intersection coordination diagram under different speeds can provide a straightforward tool for informed offset adjustments of actuated traffic signal coordination. In contrast, the state-of-the-practice traffic coordination performance analysis relies on fixed timings and empirical fine-tuning in the field. It is expected that these efforts can provide new insights to practitioners on how to use emerging traffic data better to improve the performance of actuated traffic signal operations on arterials.

Development and Evaluation of Performance Measures for Capacity Utilization of Traffic Signals

“…A high-fidelity Vissim microsimulation model of Broward Blvd, located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, developed previously, was used as a testbed (42,45). The authors used PTV Vissim due to its flexibility to model various traffic operations/conditions (46)(47)(48)(49)(50)(51)(52)(53) and to generate high-resolution data (54)(55)(56). The examined 1 mi segment of Broward Blvd encompasses five consecutive signalized intersections (as shown in Figure 7), from SR 7 on the west to NW 31st Avenue on the east side.…”

Optimizing signal timing of the arterial‐branch intersection: A fuzzy control and nonlinear programming approach

“…However, it was argued that the phase sequence of the signal timing should not be altered for safety and mobility concerns [9]. Recently, researchers attempted to explore the best allocation for green time to adapt to real-time traffic conditions by taking the unit extension as the smallest step [10][11][12][13]. However, the values of unit extension time varied across studies.…”