Analysis and visualization of traffic signal performances

Road transportation network is significant backbone of current society with the increasing demand of mobility. Traffic controlling is a big challenge in many cities, especially growing cities. Since the capacity of traffic throughput is limited in urban area, it is critical to improve the capacity of traffic network. Traffic signals controlling as an elementary component of all the road transportation system, and it is used to solve this problem of traffic conflict on intersections. However, many traffic management systems lack the ability to qualify characterized arterial performances. That also provides the reason to develop methods to qualifying arterial performances. The performance of traffic flow through intersections depends on the phases, sequence and the timing of traffic signals. Therefore, efficient traffic signal operation is vital for smooth traffic flows in signalized network, and well-maintained signal operation is greatly beneficial for road users. With the increasing traffic jam on the road, traffic engineers are looking for some new approaches on intuitive interface to manage and analyze the traffic signal system. Some traffic solutions provide measurements of traffic performance, like ImFlow system, which is a business product on European market. ImFlow requires very high expenditures for equipment, installation and maintenance. The purpose of my thesis is to develop a substitute of ImFlow that has no extra demand of equipment on roadway, as an economic and lightweight solution to satisfy the demand of performance analysis, and further to assist traffic engineers manage and maintain traffic signal system in prevailing intersections. A critical work for the thesis is to select suitable and useful measurements of signal performances based on available traffic data and engineers requirements. The selected performances in the thesis include green duration, queue length, waiting time, volume, maximum capacity, saturation flow rate, active green and percentage of vehicle arrival on green. The algorithms used in the thesis are referred from others previous research and adjusted based on our actual cases. According to measurements of those traffic performances, traffic engineers could make decisions with analytical traffic data. The thesis provides approaches to process and analyze traffic signal data in Finland, implement and visualize measurements of traffic signal performances. An important contribution of the thesis is that provides an economical and lightweight solution to analyze traffic signal data and spreads the service to general intersections