A decentralized intersection management system through collaborative negotiation between smart signals

• Published in: Journal of intelligent transportation systems Vol. 27; no. 2; pp. 272 - 294
• Main Authors: Graves, Russell T., Nelson, Zachariah E., Chakraborty, Subhadeep
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia Taylor & Francis 04-03-2023; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Agents (artificial intelligence); Artificial intelligence; Communications systems; Controllers; Cooperative control; Decentralization; distributed control; Intelligent agents; intelligent control systems; Machine learning; Negotiations; Optimization; Optimization techniques; Performance enhancement; signalized intersections; Test stands; Traffic congestion; Traffic control; Traffic flow; Traffic intersections; Traffic signals; Travel time; Urban environments
• ISSN: 1547-2450; 1547-2442
• DOI: 10.1080/15472450.2021.2016405

Actuated and pre-timed traffic signal controllers have been beneficial to the improvement of traffic flow in cities and dense urban environments around the world. While these methods have been effective in reducing traffic congestion, recent works have shown that incorporation of reinforcement learning (RL) or other artificial intelligence (AI) based optimization techniques may further improve the performance of traffic signal controllers. This work investigates a novel decentralized traffic signal control structure which encourages cooperative signal behavior via repeated negotiations between neighboring intelligent agents. This method capitalizes on emerging inter-infrastructure communications technologies to exercise 'system-level' control over a network of connected signalized intersections. The proposed method was tested in a simplified grid-network of 20 intersections. In this network, static arrivals of
along east-west lanes and
along north-south lanes were supplied. In addition, a simulated shift to
along east-west lanes and
along north-south lanes was analyzed to provide insights into the presented method's performance in response to any sudden shifts in traffic patterns. The findings indicated that, when compared to non-negotiating traffic signals, the presented method may improve the service rate of traffic networks under static conditions by
on average, reduce emissions by an average of
in addition to reducing travel time across a network of intersections. The performance characteristics were captured by a SUMO testbed, and computational efficiency was explored using a suite of simple testbeds developed in MATLAB.