Signal Timing Estimation Using Sample Intersection Travel Times

Signal timing information is important in signal operations and signal/arterial performance measurement. Such information, however, may not be available for wide areas. This imposes difficulty, particularly for real-time signal/arterial performance measurement and traffic information provisions that have received much attention recently. We study, in this paper, the possibility of using intersection travel times, i.e., those collected between upstream and downstream locations of an intersection, to estimate signal timing parameters. The method contains three steps: 1) cycle breaking that determines whether a new cycle starts; 2) exact cycle boundary detection that determines when exactly a cycle starts or ends; and 3) effective red (or green) time estimation that estimates the actual duration of the red (or green) time. The proposed method is a combination of traffic flow theory and learning/estimation algorithms and can be used to estimate the cycle-by-cycle signal timing parameters for a specific movement of a signal. The method is tested using data from microscopic simulation, field experiments, and next-generation simulation with promising results.