Seminar: Distributed control of urban traffic networks by using continuous Petri nets
Title: Distributed control of urban traffic networks by using continuous Petri nets
Speaker: Carlos Renato Vázquez
Abstract: Coordinated control of traffic lights in an urban area offers good prospects for reducing travel time and pollution due to traffic, especially under rush hour conditions. The control action that can be used in order to improve the behavior of the system consists in selecting the red-to-green switching times of traffic signals. Various approaches to the design of control laws have been proposed and implemented, from the 1950s onwards. Nevertheless, given the combinatorial nature of the coordination problem, and the complicated dynamics of the system, there is still a lot of scope for improving the controller agents in such a network.
The issue is to find a good compromise between locally minimizing the delays of vehicles streams at each intersection, while maintaining global stability of the network. Good coordination requires a model that allows the efficient representation of both the delays at intersections, and the flows of traffic between intersections.
The present work discusses a new methodology for representing this dynamic behavior of urban traffic networks, by using a hybrid Petri net model. Furthermore, it is also shows how this model can be used for designing controllers for the traffic lights in such a network.
