Signal Controller Design for Agent-Based Traffic Control System

The development of urban traffic control system asks for high performance and complex function of the signal controller at intersection. It causes increasing of cost and difficulty associated with operation, maintenance, upgrading and expansion of signal controller. In this paper, we introduce agent-based networked traffic control system which "control on demand". In this system, a traffic signal controller becomes an agent host where different agents reside at different times in response to different traffic condition. Producing, dispatching, migrating, replacing of control agents are processed in the high level regional traffic control center and global traffic operation center. In order to fulfill the requirements of agent-based traffic system, we designed a new type of signal controller. It is integrated with main control module, lamp control module, input module, voltage/current monitor module and failure detecting module. A traffic controller application-specific operating system (tcASOS) runs on the main control module and achieves effective, reliable real-time traffic signal control operation. The hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the signal controller shows that this agent-based traffic control system has better performance than traditional fixed time and actuated control systems.