Adaptive Traffic Light Control for Competing Vehicle and Pedestrian Flows

We study the Traffic Light Control (TLC) problem for a single intersection, considering both straight driving vehicle flows and corresponding crossing pedestrian flows with the goal of achieving a fair jointly optimal sharing policy in terms of average waiting times. Using a stochastic hybrid system model, we design a quasi-dynamic policy controlling the traffic light cycles with several threshold parameters applied to the light cycles and the partially observed contents of vehicle and pedestrian queues. Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) is then used to derive a data-driven gradient estimator of a cost metric with respect to the policy parameters and to iteratively adjust these parameters through an online gradient-based algorithm in order to improve overall performance on this intersection and adapt the policy to changing traffic conditions. The controller is applied to a simulated intersection in the town of Veberöd, Sweden, to illustrate the performance of this approach using real traffic data from this intersection.