Hybrid Acyclic and Spillback-Aware Scheduling Protocol for Intelligent Traffic Lights Control

Traffic jam is a major issue in modern cities. By increasing delay and pollution, road congestions restrict mobility and are proving to be a menace to public health. Particularly, at closely spaced intersections they are reflected in queue spillbacks between upstream and downstream lanes. In this paper, we address their mitigation as a variation of the well-known capacitated facility location problem. We suggest an integer programming formulation along with a delay-and-queue-based traffic lights control heuristic. Unlike solutions commonly found in the literature, the proposed protocol is simultaneously acyclic, fully decentralized, traffic type independent, and able to handle emergency vehicles. Simulation results show that it outperforms two recent related state-of-the-art schemes in terms of minimising delay and queue length especially in a urban network scenario.