A Distributed Approach for Traffic Signal Synchronization Problem

In this work a distributed algorithm for the optimization of signal setting on urban network is proposed. The Traffic Signal Synchronization is a traffic engineering technique of matching the green light times for a series of intersections to enable the maximum number of vehicles to pass through, thereby reducing stops and delays experienced by motorists. Synchronizing Traffic Signals ensures a better flow of traffic and minimizes gas consumption and pollutant emissions. In this paper we provide a solution to the traffic signals problem via simulation. The objective function used in this work is a weighted sum of the delays caused by the signalized intersections, and it is calculated by CTM UT model via simulation. We proposed a decomposition of the network, considering the cooperation between different subnetworks. Given the subnetworks the surrogate method is applied to solve the Traffic Signal Synchronization problem. Numerical experiments on test network are reported.