Study and Evaluation of Traffic Responsive Control on a Large Arterial Network

Abstract

Traffic responsive mode of operation with its two mechanisms, threshold-based and pattern matching, is considered one of the effective and efficient signal control modes. This operation mode is underutilized due to its cumbersome configuration procedure. The research presented in this thesis aims to give some guidelines regarding traffic responsive and issues that might improve the system performance.

Four different issues related to traffic responsive are considered: The first issue is the generation of different traffic scenarios that drive the design of the system. This point is not limited to traffic responsive only but it is more general for different traffic engineering applications that need different traffic scenarios. The second issue is presenting an approach to implement traffic responsive control mode of operation in a large arterial network in Northern Virginia. Pattern matching mechanism is used for this application. Compared to time-of-day control mode, traffic responsive control saves up to 26.94% of the average delay and 21.13% of average number of stops for Reston Parkway network.

The third issue is an attempt to improve the current threshold mechanism by relaxing the threshold constraints and using variable thresholds for different levels of plan selection parameters. The last issue is a study for the pedestrian effect on the performance of networks operating by traffic responsive control. The effects of pedestrian calls and pedestrian phases on traffic responsive control are compared and the results shows that pedestrian calls are better for low pedestrian volumes while pedestrian phases are better for high pedestrian volumes.