Abstract Manager

First introduced about a decade ago, are now commonly used by many transportation agencies operating traffic signals in North America. Based on high-resolution traffic events collected by the traffic signal controller, ATSPMs comprise a standard set of visualizations designed to provide insights to traffic engineers as to how their traffic signals are performing, and where performance may be being adversely affected by equipment failures of suboptimal signal timing parameters. In addition to the open-source UDOT ATSPM software, several commercial ATSPM-based products have been developed that extend the standard ATSPM reports with value-added features such as before and after comparison analysis, anomaly detection and notification, and automated signal timing optimization. Moreover, other powerful forms of traffic signal analytics have emerged based on alternative data sources such as high-resolution OEM vehicle trajectory data, edge-based video analytics, radar, and lidar.

Through extensive market research and the development of our own ATSPM product and deployment to numerous customers in recent years, Parsons has learned some interesting lessons as to the costs of deploying these analytical tools, the value that these tools bring to the agencies using them, and the limiting factors affecting their large-scale adoption. Furthermore, we have learned from experience the value-added features that agencies find to be most beneficial and have seen the potential of alternative data sources to shed light on aspects of network performance that standard ATSPMs cannot illuminate.

Through practical examples, this presentation will explore the value proposition that ATSPMs can provide to those agencies that invest in their use, will discuss some critical limitations of ATSPMs, and will explore how alternatives based on other sources of data can provide different kinds of insights that may be more relevant to certain agencies.