Modeling and control of urban road intersections with incidents via timed Petri nets

Petri nets (PNs) are well utilized as a visual and mathematical formalism in modeling, analysis and control of urban traffic. This work adopts timed Petri nets to design a traffic-signal-based emergency control policy such that emergency response is provided and the incident-induced large-scale congestion is prevented. A reachability graph method is adopted to demonstrate how the models are used to enforce the phase of traffic signal transitions. It improves the state of the art in traffic incident response and control.