Back Pressure Traffic Signal Control with Fixed and Adaptive Routing for Urban Vehicular Network

Journal article, 2016

City-wide control and coordination of traffic flow can improve efficiency, fuel consumption, and safety. We con- sider the problem of controlling traffic lights under fixed and adaptive routing of vehicles in urban road networks. Multi- commodity back-pressure algorithms, originally developed for routing and scheduling in communication networks, are applied to road networks to control traffic lights and adaptively reroute vehicles. The performance of the algorithms is analyzed using a microscopic traffic simulator. The results demonstrate that the proposed multi-commodity and adaptive routing algorithms pro- vide significant improvement over a fixed schedule controller and a single-commodity back-pressure controller, in terms of various performance metrics, including queue-length, trips completed, travel times, and fair traffic distribution.