Distributed traffic control for a large-scale urban network

Abstract: Motivated by the fact that intelligent traffic control systems have become inevitable demand to cope with the risk of traffic congestion in urban areas, this paper develops a distributed control strategy for urban traffic networks. Since these networks contain a large number of roads having different directions, each of them can be described as a multi-agent system. Thus, a coordination among traffic flows is required to optimize the operation of the overall network. In order to determine control decisions, we describe the objective of improving traffic conditions as a constrained optimization problem with respect to downstream traffic flows. By applying the gradient projection method and the minimal polynomial of a matrix pair, we propose algorithms that allow each road cell to determine its control decision corresponding to the optimal solution while using only its local information. The effectiveness of our proposed algorithms is validated by numerical simulations.