An arterial traffic control system influences the travel time characteristics of a corridor, including the average corridor travel time and the travel time reliability. However, reliability measures have typically been outside of the focus of arterial control system performance evaluation studies. To assess the effectiveness of arterial traffic control performance evaluation studies are normally limited to average measures of travel time, speed, or delay. As an advanced traffic management system, adaptive traffic control has been developed to address real time demand variability. Thus, an evaluation of the adaptive traffic control system based on reliability may be as important as evaluation based on average travel time or delay.
In addition, arterial control systems may also affect the performance of side street traffic as well as arterial corridor traffic. The performance of side street traffic is another measure that should be used in the assessment of the effectiveness of any arterial traffic control system. Finally, an arterial's operational performance often changes throughout a day and over the arterial length. Thus, a system-wide measure that reflects the range of observed operations is needed to thoroughly assess the performance.
Given these issues the goal of this research is the development of procedures to evaluate adaptive traffic control's effect on arterial characteristics such as travel time distribution, reliability, side street performance, and system-wide performance. The developed procedures were applied to the evaluation of an adaptive traffic control system, SCATS (Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System) in Cobb County, Georgia that replaced a semi-actuated coordinated control system.
After the procedures were applied, it was found that SCATS produced a less extreme shape of travel time distribution, possibly due to the adaptive feature, but that it did not make statistically significant changes in the selected overall analysis measures. Also, it was found that the results of the performance evaluation can vary depending on the measures selected or the study period and location.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/31839 |
| Date | 16 November 2009 |
| Creators | Wu, Seung Kook |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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