A distributed traffic control strategy based on cell-transmission model

This paper presents a distributed traffic control strategy based on cell-transmission model (CTM). In view of the drawbacks of the CTM in describing the evolution of traffic flow on the intersections under the control signals, we modify the CTM and propose a simplified model. A series of rules is designed with the help of the subgradient descent method to update the status of intersections. Unlike the conventional method, the traffic signal timing plan is found in a fully distributed manner. The evolution of traffic flow for several kinds of typical traffic states is studied through numerical simulation, and the validity and benefits of our method are evaluated against the most popular mixed-integer linear programing.