Automatic Control Methods as the Basis for the Development of Intelligent Urban Traffic Control Systems

A constructive way of automatic control methods application to traffic lights regulation of intersections is proposed. The main idea is to determine the traffic lights phases’ duration for the next traffic lights cycle to improve the indicators of traffic efficiency relying on their values for preceding cycles; the ways of their determination by local traffic situation monitoring are presented. The organization of computational experiments for the choice of the most proper method and its parameters for a certain traffic situation is proposed; it uses the statistical distribution of temporal headways in vehicles’ clusters. The efficiency of automatic control methods for a set of traffic situations on a certain T-junction is studied and the average vehicle delay decrease for some of them is confirmed. Limitation of local application of the proposed methods resulting from the condensed traffic on exit roads may be overcome by coordinating traffic control at neighboring intersections.