A heuristic approach to the application of bandwidth-oriented signal coordination is proposed based on a system partition technique. The proposed approach divides a long signalized arterial into subsystems of coordination based on clustering results considering factors such as block distance and turning movements. Each subsystem is optimized to achieve the maximum bandwidth efficiency. Evaluation of the system includes two parts, THOS (through opportunity) comparison and simulation evaluation. The motivation of system partition is to overcome the capacity limitation that may exist for the progression band of the entire corridor. Clustering method is used to produce reasonable partitioning points that turn out to be intersections with heavy turning volumes or further away from the adjacent intersections. Afterwards, two case studies are presented to illustrate how the proposed approach can be applied, and the influence of system partition on corridor performance is presented with comparison of scenarios with different ways of partitioning. Evaluation of the case study shows that system partitioning method may be beneficial in improving progression bandwidth, bandwidth efficiency, bandwidth attainability and THOS. In some situations, better corridor performance was achieved by partitioning the corridor into two or three parts, but in some other conditions the performance may not improve because of the additional control delay and stops at the partitioning points. The paper concludes that partitioning may present an effective solution to certain heavily traveled corridor with bandwidth capacity problem from the coordinated timing plan developed with the conventional bandwidth optimization procedure.
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