OD-Based Partition Technique to Improve Arterial Signal Coordination Using Connected Vehicle Data

Abstract

Maximizing two-way arterial bands often plays a critical role in signal coordination along urban arterials. With an increasing number of signals involved, the arterial bands tend to shrink to some extent resulting in inefficient arterial signal coordination, and not all vehicles fully take advantage of the arterial bands to travel through the entire corridor. In response to that, system partition is a technique for handling arterials with many signals. Rather than designing end-to-end signal coordination, efficient arterial signal coordination is highly reliant on traffic origin and destination (OD) patterns on the arterial, which have been difficult to obtain using conventional data collection methods. The emerging big data sources, such as connected vehicles, provide great potential to gather such invaluable OD information for improving arterial signal coordination. This research proposes an easy-to-implement OD-based partition technique to improve arterial signal coordination by utilizing vehicle trajectory data automatically collected from connected vehicles. The proposed signal timing technique was tested using an arterial with 17 signalized intersections in Orange County, California. The results demonstrated that the OD-based partition technique improved the arterial average travel speed by 2.7% and 12.1% for the eastbound and westbound directions, respectively. At the same time, the proposed technique shortened the arterial average travel time by 2.6% and 11.1% for the eastbound and westbound directions, respectively. The total travel time was shortened both for the main-street and side-street major traffic flows.