01660247

Component

Development of signal timing plans and scheduling of their operating intervals is one of the effective ways to deal with traffic fluctuations. While the analysis of Time-Of-Day (TOD) break points have been widely documented, the authors do not know how many peak-period signal plans over the course of a year are needed to cope with day-to-day traffic fluctuations. Once number of plans is defined how does one know when to deploy them? If the traffic varies wildly from day to day is it still good to develop new plans or should we look into adaptive traffic control solutions? This paper investigates these questions, which have been unaddressed so far. Furnished with a large data sets from a 5-mile corridor in Fort Lauderdale, FL the authors analyze traffic profiles using 15-minute volume and travel time data over a two-year period.K-means clustering algorithm is applied to extract distinctive traffic profiles for a morning peak-hour using traffic volumes, travel times, and an integrated data set of these two. Each of the extracted profiles is assigned to a day when it occurred which is considered as a representative day. Signal plans are developed for each of the representative days by using Vistro. The authors refer to them as Day-Of-Year (DOY) signal plans - the concept that they preliminary introduced in this study, in an analogy to TOD plans. Results show that clustering of volume and travel time lead to the different sets of representative days and DOY signal plans. More importantly, the compactness of revealed traffic patterns suggests that multiple DOY signal plans may be appropriate solutions for 80% of the days in a year. Future research should consider further development of this idea and its integration in a decision-support system.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB25 Standing Committee on Traffic Signal Systems. Alternate title: Identifying Need for Changeability of Traffic Signal Control Through Clustering of Multiple Field Traffic Data.

18-02607

English

18p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Adaptive control; Cluster analysis; Days; Optimization; Signalization; Traffic data; Traffic signal timing

Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-02607

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 10:37AM