Integrated traffic control for incidents in freeway arterial corridors

This paper investigates the impact of diverted freeway traffic on a typical surface street network under different signal timing plans to learn how to select optimal timing plans. New timing plans are developed for the network using PASSER-II to optimize signals on the alternate route to explicitly serve traffic diverting around a freeway incident. Operations in the network are then simulated with these timing plans and various incident scenarios to investigate how these plans affect corridor performance during different types of incidents. The integrated network simulation program INTEGRATION(C) is used for this analysis. Measures of effectiveness including average network travel speed for each timing plan and incident scenario are compared with respect to operation of the entire corridor (the freeway system and the surrounding street network).