Integrating Progression Band and Delay Optimization for Arterials with Unbalanced Directional Traffic

Unbalanced directional traffic is commonly observed in commuting corridors, where the high-volume direction may experience queue spillbacks and turning bay blockages that significantly downgrade the traffic efficiency. The traditional wisdom that naturally favors the high-volume direction often neglect the needs of the low-volume direction, incurring unnecessary delays. Such a dilemma raises a challenging need for a signal plan that concurrently ensures the traffic efficiency of both directions with distinct traffic features. Fully recognizing the achievement of two major families of signal optimization models, delay minimization and progression maximization, this project intend to integrate their merits, and present a novel traffic signal model to minimize the through delay in the high-volume direction while preserving the progression in the low-volume direction. To achieve such an objective, this project will develop a mathematical programming framework with essential formulations. Especially, to estimate the queueing delay accurately with signal related parameters, unlike most existing studies assuming the uniformly distributed incoming traffic flow, the project will explicitly formulate the queue evolution process by accounting for the time-varying vehicle arrival rates resulting from the distinct upstream traffic streams. Such a detailed formulation shall enable the model to flexibly select the optimal phase sequences that allow low-volume traffic streams to join the queue prior to those high-volume ones, thus minimizing queuing delays despite the maximum queue length being inevitably long. Moreover, the negative impacts of left turn vehicles merging into through queues due to the left-turn bay blockage by the expanding through queue should be also taken into consideration in the through delay computation. The proposed model with carefully designed formulations is expected to yield improved network-wide delay, fewer vehicle stops, and a shorter duration of left-turn bay blockage.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $150000
• Contract Numbers:

  CMMM-UMDGL-2023-C0003

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  University of Maryland, College Park

  College Park, MD  United States  20742
• Project Managers:

  Gang-Len, Chang

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Maryland, College Park

  College Park, MD  United States  20742
• Principal Investigators:

  Chang, Gang-Len

• Start Date: 20231001
• Expected Completion Date: 20240930
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Commuters; Congestion management systems; Left turns; Traffic delays; Traffic queuing; Traffic signal timing
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01909257
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Center for Multi-Modal Mobility in Urban, Rural, and Tribal Areas (CMMM)
• Contract Numbers: CMMM-UMDGL-2023-C0003
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Feb 22 2024 3:54PM