Capacity-aware back-pressure traffic signal control

Jean Gregoire (1) , Xiangjun Qian (1) , Emilio Frazzoli (2) , Arnaud de La Fortelle (1, 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. Previous work demonstrates that the so-called back-pressure control provides stability guarantees, assuming infinite queues capacities. In this paper, we highlight the failing of current 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 densities, and recovering original back-pressure as capacities grow to infinity. This capacity-aware back-pressure control allows to improve performance as congestion increases, as indicated by simulation results, and keeps the key benefits of back-pressure: ability to be distributed over intersections and $\mathcal{O}(1)$ complexity.

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

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Jean Gregoire, Xiangjun Qian, Emilio Frazzoli, Arnaud de La Fortelle, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn. Capacity-aware back-pressure traffic signal control. 2013. ⟨hal-00865966v3⟩