Balancing Safety and Capacity in an Adaptive Traffic Signal Control System

This research is designed to develop a methodology that will identify unsafe traffic conditions such as rear-end, angle and left-turn crashes at individual signalized intersections, and in arterial and grid signalized networks. This research project will have a final product in the form of an algorithms, that would be developed to alleviate such safety risks by adjusting controller timing and operational parameters. The direction outlined in this proposal is to follow a three-step product development process. This first step will be to identfy the relationships between traffic signal timing parameters and safety. The second step will be to convert the relationships identified in the first step to an alogrithm that will execute in an off-line environment. The third step will be to convert the off-line process developed in step two to a real-time algorithm that would execute in a modern NEMA and 2070 type controllers in parallel with the adaptive control algorithm. This last step will be developed in Phase II of this SBIR program.