Distributed Weighted Balanced Control of Traffic Signals for Urban Traffic Congestion

Since urban traffic congestion has become a major problem for big cities in recent years, we propose a distributed control scheme for traffic lights in the network. First, a new criterion called traffic process ability which implies the balance between the traffic demand and traffic capacity of each road is introduced. Moreover, the congestion of a road is mitigated by utilizing the traffic process ability of the neighbors more effectively, where different weights are assigned to roads in each agent according to their importance or the real-time traffic conditions. As only local information is needed, a distributed control scheme in which the road network is divided among several agents is proposed. Furthermore, in order to accelerate the congestion dissipation process, the aggregated state of each agent is introduced into the performance index and balanced with its neighboring agents. The control signals are calculated by agents in a parallel way and the optimization problem is solved iteratively to reach a convergence. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is evaluated by simulation under different scenarios and the performance is compared with the traffic responsive control method SCOOT.