Movement-based look-ahead traffic-adaptive intersection control

Reference:
R.T. van Katwijk, B. De Schutter, and J. Hellendoorn, "Movement-based look-ahead traffic-adaptive intersection control," Proceedings of the UKACC International Conference on Control 2008, London, UK, 6 pp., Sept. 2008. Paper Th09.01.

Abstract:
There exist several control approaches for traffic signal control such as fixed-time, vehicle-actuated, or look-ahead traffic-adaptive control. We argue that in order to flexibly deal with varying demand levels movement-based control (which is already common in vehicle-actuated intersection control) is required instead of stage-based control (which is still employed in the state-of-the-art in look-ahead traffic-adaptive control). The movement-based approach is more flexible than the stage-based approach as it allows green for signals in different stages to start sooner if the demand for all conflicting movements in the current stage has cleared. Therefore, we propose a new movement-based method for look-ahead traffic-adaptive control. The method uses dynamic programming and branch-and-bound algorithms to determine the optimal traffic signal settings. We illustrate via a simulation example that the new approach can significantly outperform vehicle-actuated and stage-based look-ahead traffic-adaptive control.