Ashwin Sullia, a Utah State University graduate engineering student, won the 2005 Best Student Paper Award for the Intermountain Section from the National Institute of Transportation Engineers. Sullia presented his paper at the ITE Intermountain Section annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in May.
Sullia's research deals with how to predict traffic flows and how they are affected by intersections. The research was his master's project and was sponsored by the California Department of Transportation.
"In metropolitan cities, travelers and road users experience significant delay due to traffic signals," said Sullia. "I am trying to develop new signal optimization models which could reduce the delay due to a traffic signal at an intersection, in turn reducing travel time."
Sullia said that field testing this technique is not safe and is costly and risky. He developed a simple adaptive control system, created a testing environment to test and evaluated it in the lab.
The adaptive control system incorporates the PREDICT model to anticipate the traffic flows from the surrounding intersections. An online signal optimization model is used to obtain the signal timing plan for subsequent cycles, based on the traffic flows predicted in the previous cycle. The inclusion of the traffic controller into the microscopic simulation, known as hardware-in-the-loop simulation, provides a safe, cost-effective testing environment to evaluate the performance of the proposed adaptive control system.
Sullia started working on the project with USU engineering professor Henry Liu in 2004 after taking classes from him and developing an interest in intelligent transport systems.
Sullia graduated in May with a master's degree in engineering and is currently working as a transportation engineer with a firm in Texas.
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