Study of self-organizing control of traffic signals in an urban network based on cellular automata

Aiming at the problems of known traffic signal control methods, such as heavy system and huge computation, this paper presents a macroscopic two-dimensional cellular automata (CA) model of an urban traffic signal control system, in which each intersection is regarded as a cell and the flow pressure is treated as the state. The hierarchical control architecture of traffic signal is built. Off the support of the upper level (traffic control center), the lower level (intersection controllers) can implement self-organizing control of traffic signal. The signal decision at an intersection is based on the thought of "perception-decision." We establish the simple state perception rule of typical intersection. By means of the computer simulation, the application of CA in signal self-organizing control is proved effective in urban traffic.