Travel Time Estimation on a Signalised Urban Networks using Cumulative Plots

This paper presents the development and testing of a methodology for estimation of average travel time on signalised urban networks. The methodology considers the classical analytical procedure, where average travel time on a study link is estimated as the average area between cumulative plots for the respective link. The challenge is to accurately estimate the plots based on the availability of data. The three different cases of data availability are considered: a) case-D, for only detector data; b) case- DS, for detector data and signal controller data; and c) case- DSS, for detector data, signal controller data and saturation flow rate. The performance of the methodology is evaluated under controlled environment considering different degree of saturation and different detection intervals. The performance for case-DS and for case-DSS is consistent whereas, the performance for case-D is highly sensitive to the signal phases in the detection interval.