Comparison of the Effectiveness of Common Cycle Computing Models

Kurzfassung

In a coordinated road network, the common cycle is selected by evaluating the performance of the network in the given cycle length range. There are some models to compute the common cycle length. This study give a review of these current models which are TRANSYT, Synchro, “90% rule” and “largest rule”. This paper proposes a comparing model by using the Webster delay model as well. The network composed of 4 intersections is used to test the effectiveness of these five models. 15 volume levels for the main street from 250 vehicles/hour to 750 vehicles/hour are estimated. The simulation of all common cycles by all models at all volume levels are conducted by four simulation tools which are TRANSYT-14, Synchro-7, SUMO and Simtraffic. The conclusions of the effectiveness of these models are drawn through amount of experiments. It can’t say simply that which model is the best and which is the second best and so on, because MOEs at different volume levels are different. Overall, TRANSYT and “90% rule” have better MOEs at most volume levels, while the common cycle time calculated by “90% rule” is too short. The effectiveness of comparison model in this paper is not as good as commercial program, but the difference is small.