Thursday, August 10, 2023 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM (ET)
About the Webinar:
Discussion focuses on synchronizing green times on 4-way (i.e., all-directional) street grids. Our plan eschews the custom of optimizing the timing plan for each of a grid’s traffic signals to suit local conditions and uses instead common phase durations for all signals. This simple idea enables us to exploit features of perfectly orthogonal grids, to synchronize all signals on the grid in two orthogonal (e.g., northbound and westbound) travel directions. As a result, all drivers headed toward clustered workplaces in the morning rush, and away from those workplaces in the evening, enjoy exceptionally good signal progression over their entire trips, even when their inbound or outbound paths entail two directions. One synchronization mode is used for undersaturated conditions when queues dissipate during green times; another is used when conditions become oversaturated with long residual queues; and our strategy toggles promptly between these two synchronization modes, as measurable conditions on the grid change over time. Simulations of numerous scenarios indicate that our simple, adaptive strategy dramatically outperforms other synchronization schemes, including complicated ones and those viewed as gold standards. Importantly, we also show that our strategy can be easily modified to perform well on irregular, real-world street grids.
About the Presenter:
Michael Cassidy is the Robert Horonjeff Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a doctorate in civil engineering (majoring in transportation engineering) from Berkeley; served for nearly 4 years as an assistant professor in the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana; and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1994. He is currently an associate editor of the journal Transportation Research Part B. He is a member of the International Advisory Committee for the International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory; a former Director of the University Transportation Center for federal region 9; and a Vice Chair in Berkeley’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. His research interests focus on transportation planning and management, particularly in the areas of highway traffic, public mass transit and multi-modal systems.
