Abstract Manager

Currently, there are various arterial data sources available in supporting traffic signal operations in North America. One of the most promising data sources is the high-resolution traffic signal controller logs, which are footprints of traffic signal controllers’ behavior. In taking advantage of that, many public agencies start trying or deploying the Automated Traffic Signal Performance Matrices (ATSPM). One of the key reasons of such widely adoption of ATSPM is that its data standard was already fully supported by major traffic signal controller vendors.

Even though there are many existing so called “Signal Performance Matrices (SPM)” existing with the ATSPM software, there is still improvement space available. For instance, the most common method to reveal the arterial traffic bottleneck is the Time-Space Diagram (TSD), unfortunately, it still is not a standard feature of the most ATSPM systems. The TSD reveals the performance of traffic signal control across multiple intersections and the performance metrics include green bandwidth, maximum queue length, and so on. Luckily, with the high-resolution traffic signal footprints data from the ATSPM system, the constructing of TSD could be achieved.

In addition, ideally, the constructing TSDs with hi-resolution ATSPM data could be even more powerfully in visualizing the signal operation status, if it could incorporate synchronous vehicle trajectories with sufficient penetration rate. This is also durable because of the gradually availability of connected vehicle data either from the pilot-deployed connected vehicle system, or from the connected vehicle-like data service provider.

In short, this presentation demonstrated the innovative way of integrating the connected vehicle data along with high-resolution ATSPM data in constructing the “new version” of the time-space diagram. It could be considered as the new ATSPM performance matric that can provide a more accurate visualization of the arterial traffic signal operation status, meanwhile, eliminate the traditional engineering assumption in plotting time-space diagrams.