Max-pressure controller for stabilizing the queues in signalized arterial networks

Abstract

The problem of arterial signal control is considered here. Urban intersections face serious congestion problems and at the same time the installation and maintenance of centralized systems is deemed cumbersome. A decentralized approach which is relatively simple to implement is studied here. The recently proposed max-pressure controller, which provably stabilizes the queues of arterial traffic systems, is tested in simulations. Different modifications of the controller are analyzed and compared under the same demand scenarios. The mesoscopic model used for the simulation experiments is an extended version of the store-and-forward model and emulates the arterial traffic network as a queuing system. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of max-pressure algorithm, which, under certain conditions, can stabilize all queues of the system.