Effectiveness of Adaptive Traffic Control for Arterial Signal Management: Modeling Results

This study identifies and selects the most promising existing adaptive control algorithms for arterial streets, evaluates performance through simulation, and develops a plan for field testing of the most promising algorithms on a real-world arterial. A section of Highway 1 in the city of Lomita, California was selected as the test site for evaluation of adaptive signal control strategies. A methodology was developed to obtain a time-varying origin-destination (OD) matrix from the system loop detector data at the test site. The calibrated OD matrix was applied to a microscopic representation of the site created in PARAMICS. A plug-in for simulating signal control in PARAMICS was written to explicitly model pretimed, isolated actuated, coordinated actuated, traffic responsive, and critical intersection control, as well as adaptive strategies. The analysis of the simulation results shows that RHODES is the best control strategy at the selected arterial.