A Wireless Sensor Network with Accurate Time Synchronization and Wide Area Coverage for Traffic Signal Timing Analysis

Traffic congestion on our nation’s transportation network poses a major threat to economic prosperity and our citizens’ quality of life. When dealing with traffic congestion, especially the congestion caused by nonrecurring events, proactively managing the traffic signals in the network can be critical in accommodating the drastically varying traffic demands caused by the non-recurrent event, thus minimizing the disruptions to the traffic flows. We proposes to further develop and test an automated, expert system based Traffic Signal Analysis and Control Decision Support System (TSAC-DSS) tool, and demonstrate/validate this tool at nearby Traffic Management Centers with real traffic network data and events. The goal of the tool is to assist TMC operators and signal engineers in making well-informed decisions on handling traffic anomalies, by performing similar levels of decision making via an expert system or other forms of artificial intelligence. The objectives of the Phase IIB project include (1) advancing the computing technology in traffic management practice; (2) building an advanced Expert System based system, which will be operational at TMCs’ and (3) testing the new system at DE and NOVA TMCs..