| In recent years, the traffic congestion problem has increased to such an extent, that it alarms traffic engineers. Most often these problems occur in urban, and/or inter-urban networks. The most obvious solution of this problem, expanding the facilities by adding more lanes to the street system, is seldom feasible. Therefore, traffic engineers need to make optimum use of existing traffic networks.;A great deal of theory has been developed that could potentially aid the traffic engineer in obtaining solutions to some of these problems. Unfortunately, most traffic engineers are unfamiliar with operations research concepts; therefore, the research performed in this area has not been fully utilized. The research described herein provides computer-based optimization methodology within a decision support environment. Traffic engineers can apply this system without knowing the full theory or underlying concepts to be able to solve selected traffic control problems. The engineer's responsibility is to comprehend the explicit assumptions and supply the required data.;MAXBAND 86 is the end product of this research. MAXBAND 86 takes traffic network data, formulates the problem as a mixed integer linear program, solves the problem and prints the results in terms common to traffic engineers. The MAXBAND 86 software is coded in FORTRAN 77 using structured programming design. The program consists of over sixteen thousand lines of code and is composed of 265 subroutines. It has been extensively tested on several actual network problems. MAXBAND 86 will be of value to traffic engineers faced with developing signal control strategies for urban street networks. This research was sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration, Washington, D.C. under contract number DOT-FH61-84-C-00051.;The problem of traffic signal synchronization in a general traffic network is addressed herein. The traffic signal network problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear program. A methodology for the general use of this problem solving technique is developed and implemented for traffic networks. Prior to this research, there was no procedure for optimizing the progression bandwidth in a general traffic network. |
