Development and evaluation of a Network-wide Traffic Signal Coordination Algorithm (NeTSCA) for improved operational performance

Traffic congestion is becoming an increasingly serious issue in urban road networks across the United States and around the world. Over many solutions to traffic congestion, operational improvement is preferred because a properly designed and fine-tuned traffic signal timing plan can significantly improve travel delay of motorists, progression of traffic flow, vehicle emissions, fuel consumption and operating costs. In this dissertation, a traffic signal coordination algorithm, named Network-wide.;Traffic Signal Coordination Algorithm (NeTSCA), is developed aiming to improve the operational performance of traffic network. The developed algorithm consists of two optimization levels: corridor level and network level. At the corridor level, NeTSCA maximizes the bandwidth along each corridor, taking unbalanced directional traffic flow, residual queue and start-up delay into account. At the network level, NeTSCA aims to maximize total network bandwidth under the major intersection constraints, while taking corridor importance level into account. Offset fine-tuning functionality is designed into NeTSCA as a post-processing optimization step to deal with vehicle speed variation and other complex practical situations.;Micro-simulation is utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of NeTSCA on improving network operational performance in comparison with SYNCHRO and a baseline condition under various traffic conditions. Statistical analyses on performance measures obtained from VISSIM micro-simulation platform validate that NeTSCA can effectively improve network-wide operational performance with a decreased average delay, an increased average speed and a reduced average number of stops under most test scenarios. Future work such as real-time optimization capability and field implementation of the developed algorithm are discussed in this dissertation.