Simulation-based synthesis for approximately optimal urban traffic light management

Suitable control measures and strategies must be taken to counteract the reduced throughput and the degradation of the network infrastructure caused by traffic congestion in urban networks. This paper studies and analyzes the performance of an adaptive traffic-responsive strategy that manages the traffic light parameters (the cycle time and the split time) in an urban network to reduce traffic congestion. The proposed traffic-responsive strategy adopts a nearly-optimal control formulation: first, an (approximate) solution of the HJB is parametrized via an appropriate Lyapunov positive definite matrix; then, the solution is updated via a procedure that generates candidate control strategies and selects at each iteration the best one based on the estimation of close-to-optimality and the information coming from the simulation model of the network (simulation-based design). Simulation results obtained using an AIMSUN model of the traffic network of Chania, Greece, an urban traffic network containing many varieties of junction staging, demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.