Field Evaluation of the Signal Control Strategy TUC at Three Urban Traffic Networks

Abstract

TUC (Traffic-responsive Urban Control), a new generation, network-wide, traffic-responsive urban signal control strategy was developed originally in 1998, providing only split control. TUC had been implemented successfully in two small urban traffic networks and has been extensively tested - through simulation experiments - in many different urban traffic networks, where it was found to outperform optimized fixed time signal plans. Based on the initial success of TUC, the European Commission funded the research project SMART NETS (Signal MAnagement in Real Time for urban traffic NETworkS), whose main objectives were (a) the development of the cycle, offset and public transport priority control modules of TUC, and (b) the implementation of TUC in three different urban traffic networks (Chania, Greece; Munich, Germany; and Southampton, U.K.) and the evaluation/comparison of its performance with the three state-of-the-art strategies in place at each network (TASS, BALANCE and SCOOT, respectively). This paper reports on the evaluation/comparison results from the three networks. The main conclusions drawn from the evaluation/comparison results are that TUC is an easy-to-implement, inter-operable, easily transferable traffic control strategy that can provide a very efficient performance (that is better, or, at least, similar to the ones achieved by long-standing strategies that were very well fine-tuned over the years in the specific networks) with a minimum effort of fine-tuning. The implementation of TUC can result in very significant time and fuel savings, especially in traffic networks with no or poorly performing traffic control systems.