Capacity-aware back-pressure traffic signal control

Jean Gregoire (1) , Emilio Frazzoli (2) , Arnaud de La Fortelle (3) , Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn (4)

1 CAOR - Centre de Robotique
2 Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Operations Research Center
3 IMARA - Informatique, Mathématiques et Automatique pour la Route Automatisée
4 Ministry of Science and Technology

The control of a network of signalized intersections is considered. A queuing network with exogenous arrivals is used for modelling. Previous works demonstrate that the so-called back-pressure control provides stability guarantees under infinite queues capacities. In this paper, we highlight the failing of state-of-the-art back-pressure control under finite capacities by identifying sources of non work-conservation and congestion propagation. We propose the use of a normalized pressure which guarantees work-conservation and mitigates congestion propagation while ensuring fairness at low traffic density and recovering original back-pressure as capacities grow to infinity. This capacity-aware back-pressure control enables to handle higher arrival rates, as indicated by simulation results, and keeps the key benefits of back-pressure: ability to be distributed over intersections and O(1) complexity.

Mots clés: transportation networks; traffic signal control; queuing networks; back-pressure; finite capacity

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Jean Gregoire, Emilio Frazzoli, Arnaud de La Fortelle, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn. Capacity-aware back-pressure traffic signal control. 2013. ⟨hal-00865966v1⟩