A-M Tahsin Emtenan, graduate student in the civil, construction and environmental engineering department, received an honorable mention and several awards for a recent research article.
“The paper studied both the impact of stop bar detection zone length and lane- or approach-based detector assignment on the ability of performance measures to accurately identify whether split failures occur and the impact of setback detector distance on the use of a “percent on green” metric to serve as a proxy measurement of the number of stops,” Emtenan said.
The honorable mention comes from the Traffic Signal Systems Committee during their 99th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, which was held in Washington D.C.
The awards Emtenan received on his paper include the Thomas J. Seburn Student Paper Award from MOVITE, the Missouri Valley section of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. The second award received was the Student Paper Award from the ITE Midwestern District.
These awards are given to students whose research has had the greatest impact and contribution to transportation engineering.
“This is still an ongoing research,” Emtenan said. “I am deeply honored to have received these awards, and I believe the awards will act as sources of motivation to continue my research in this area.”
A growing number of agencies are adopting the Automated Traffic Signal Performance Measures (ATSPM) technology. According to Emtenan, there is a need to understand how detector configurations can influence the outcomes of an analysis using ATSPM.
“Our ultimate goal is to develop guidelines for detector configurations for traffic signal performance measures, and I strongly believe that this research is likely to transform engineering practice once it is completed,” he said.