Decentralised Progressive Signal Systems for Organic Traffic Control

An increased mobility and the resulting rising traffic demands lead to serious congestion problems in many cities. Although there is not a single solution that will solve traffic congestion and the related environmental and economical problems, traffic light coordination is an important factor in achieving efficient networks. This paper presents a new distributed approach for dynamic traffic light coordination that relies on locally available traffic data and communication among neighbouring intersections. The coordination mechanism is combined with an organic traffic control approach to form an adaptive, distributed control system with learning capabilities. The efficiency of the resulting organic system is demonstrated in a simulation-based evaluation.