A Genetic Algorithm Approach for Optimizing Traffic Control Signals Considering Routing

Abstract

It is well known that coordinated, area-wide traffic signal control provides great potential for improvements in delays, safety, and environmental measures. However, an aspect of this problem that is commonly neglected in practice is the potentially confounding effect of drivers re-routing in response to changes in travel times on competing routes, brought about by the changes to the signal timings. This article considers the problem of optimizing signal green and cycle timings over an urban network, in such a way that the optimization anticipates the impact on traffic routing patterns. This is achieved by including a network equilibrium model as a constraint to the optimization. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) is devised for solving the resulting problem, using total travel time across the network as an illustrative fitness function, and with a widely used traffic simulation-assignment model providing the equilibrium flows. The procedure is applied to a case study of the city of Chester in the UK, and the performance of the algorithms is analyzed with respect to the parameters of the GA method. The results show a better performance of the signal timing as optimized by † The work was carried out while the author was at the University of Leeds.

Signal setting design on a road network: application of a system of models in evacuation conditions

“…Some papers report applications of genetic algorithms with no driver re-routing [27,28], other papers include driver re-routing [29,30]. Genetic algorithms are applied in order to optimize traffic signal and transit priority settings in [31].…”

A robust algorithm to solve the signal setting problem considering different traffic assignment approaches

“…Smith (2006) also suggested a bi-level optimization, where the equilibrium property of the flow is preserved during consecutive iterations. Recent results were also obtained using genetic programming (Ceylan and Bell, 2004;Teklu et al, 2007). Van den Berg et al (2008) proposed a hybrid approach using methods from both optimal control and mixed integer linear programming.…”

Ant Colony Optimization Approach for Optimizing Traffic Signal Timings

“…In urban networks, traffic signals are used to control vehicle movements so as to reduce congestion, improve safety, and enable specific strategies such as minimizing delays, improving environmental pollution, etc (Teklu et al, 2007). Due to the increasing in the number of cars and developing industry, finding optimal traffic signal parameters has been an important task in order to use the network capacity optimally.…”