Distributed urban traffic signal control based on spontaneous synchronization

This paper presents a distributed control method for traffic control at urban traffic network. This method is inspired from spontaneous synchronization. Synchronization is a prevalent phenomenon in nature that a group of objects spontaneously come into co-occurrence with a common rhythm by mutual interactions. The mechanism of synchronization allows controlling of complex processes by simple operations based on interactions between objects. Thus, each traffic signal system at intersections is modeled as a phase-oscillator. By synchronizing these oscillators, the desired global coordination can be achieved. The experiment results show that the proposed method is flexible, adaptive, and robust for the large-scale traffic control.