Decision support for coordinated road traffic control actions

Selection of the most appropriate traffic control actions to solve non-recurrent traffic congestion is a complex task, which requires significant expert knowledge and experience. Also, the application of a control action for solving a local traffic problem could create traffic congestion at different locations in the network because of the strong interrelations between traffic situations at different locations of a road network. Therefore, coordination of control strategies is required to make sure that all available control actions serve the same objective. In this paper, an Intelligent Traffic Control System (ITCS) based on a coordinated-agent approach is proposed to assist the human operator of a road traffic control centre to manage the current traffic state. In the proposed system, the network is divided into sub-networks, each of which has its own associated agent. The agent of the sub-network with an incident reacts with other affected agents in order to select the optimal traffic control action, so that a globally acceptable solution is found. The agent uses an effective way of calculating the control action fitness locally and globally. The capability of the proposed ITCS has been tested for a case study of a part of the traffic network in the Riyadh city of Saudi Arabia. The obtained results show its ability to identify the optimal global control action. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.