Distributed Event-Triggered Model Predictive Control for Urban Traffic Lights

Reference

N. Wu, D. Li, Y. Xi, and B. De Schutter, "Distributed Event-Triggered Model Predictive Control for Urban Traffic Lights," IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 4975-4985, Aug. 2021.

Abstract

Effective traffic signal control strategies are critical for traffic management in urban traffic networks. Most existing optimization-based urban traffic control approaches update the traffic signal at regular time instants, where the length of the fixed update time interval is determined based on a trade-off between the computational efficiency and the control performance. Since event-triggered control (ETC) allows for more flexible and more efficient control than conventional time-triggered control by triggering the control action by events, and since it can refrain from redundant optimization while retaining a satisfactory behavior, we use an ETC scheme for traffic light control. In addition, based on the geographically distributed feature of traffic networks, a distributed paradigm is adopted to reduce the computational complexity for the optimization. We propose a distributed threshold-based event-triggered control strategy, where the independent triggering of agents leads to an asynchronous update of traffic signals in the system. The triggered agent then solves a mixed-integer linear programming problem and updates its traffic signals. The proposed approach is evaluated under various traffic demands by simulation, and is shown to yield the best trade-off between control performance and computational complexity compared to other control strategies.

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Bibtex entry

@article{WuLi:20-014,
author={N. Wu and D. Li and Y. Xi and B. {D}e Schutter},
title={Distributed Event-Triggered Model Predictive Control for Urban Traffic Lights},
journal={IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems},
volume={22},
number={8},
pages={4975--4985},
month=aug,
year={2021},
doi={10.1109/TITS.2020.2981381}
}

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