A New Design Procedure for Traffic Signal Control Policies

A procedure for the design of traffic signal control policies which results in minimal average delay and queue length is presented. The procedure is applicable to preset and sampled data controllers. The optimal policy is computed from measurements of the average demand in each flow direction during some interval (10 minutes to several hours). In many cases, substantial improvements over classical techniques in the areas of intersection performance and safety are obtained. In other cases, the theoretical foundations of the new procedure provide proof that the classical design techniques already generate optimal solutions. Computation time for the procedure is sufficiently small to allow a single automaton to control many (100-1000) intersections in real time.