Coordination and agreement among traffic signal controllers in urban areas

© 2016 IEEE. Coordination among traffic signal controllers in urban areas has been one of the research focuses on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Many investigations have addressed this topic with the aim of improving the average traffic delay in urban arterials usually by minimizing the number of stops or by maximizing the average speed of the road. Despite the abundant literature, solutions based on the potential capacity of network communication among controllers have not been fully exploited. Assuming signal controllers as a collection of network nodes/processes with wireless communication features, they could quickly make traffic control decisions in a cooperative and distributed fashion. In this scenario, the possibility of reaching consensus and agreement even in the presence of faults should be studied. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we review current trends of urban arterial traffic signal coordination. Second, we propose how to translate the consensus problem as defined for distributed systems to ITS and present some initial performance evaluation results based on microscopic traffic simulation.