The paper titled, "Recasting Dilemma Zone Design as a Marginal Cost and Benefit Problem", by Anuj Sharma, Professor Darcy Bullock and Professor Srinivas Peeta received the 2007 Best Paper Award from the Traffic Signal Systems Committee of the Transportation Research Board. Anuj Sharma is a doctoral student being co-advised by Professor Darcy Bullock and Professor Srinivas Peeta.

One control objective at high speed isolated intersections is to provide safe phase transition by trying to minimize the occurrence of high speed vehicles in the dilemma zone, before terminating the phase. An upper limit for extending green (maximum green time) is used to avoid an indefinite extension of the main street green. Currently, the maximum green times are chosen using engineering judgment. This approach does not explicitly consider the tradeoffs between safety and delay and hence often results in both unsafe and inefficient performance at the intersection under medium to heavy traffic volumes. This paper recasts the dilemma problem as one of minimizing vehicles entering the upstream decision conflict zone (DCZ). An economic evaluation approach is proposed to maximize both safety and efficiency at the intersection by considering the problem in the terms of marginal costs and benefits. Traffic conflicts are used to estimate potential safety benefits and the induced delay cost is used to estimate the cost accrued on side street traffic that is associated with extending a competing phase. This approach allows the implementation of logic that minimizes DCZ exposure instead of the current approach of absolute protection up until maximum green time is reach, at which time no consideration is given to dilemma zone exposure when the phase is terminated. This approach handles efficiently and safely the periods of moderate demand volumes when current dilemma zone protection frequently encounters maximum green time exposure.