Type-2 fuzzy logic based urban traffic management

This paper presents a multi-agent system based on type-2 fuzzy decision module for traffic signal control in a complex urban road network. The distributed agent architecture using type-2 fuzzy set based controller was designed for optimizing green time in a traffic signal to reduce the total delay experienced by vehicles. A section of the Central Business District of Singapore simulated using PARAMICS software was used as a test bed for validating the proposed agent architecture for the signal control. The performance of the proposed multi-agent controller was compared with a hybrid neural network based hierarchical multi-agent system (HMS) controller and real-time adaptive traffic controller (GLIDE) currently used in Singapore. The performance metrics used for evaluation were total mean delay experienced by the vehicles to travel from source to destination and the current mean speed of vehicles inside the road network. The proposed multi-agent signal control was found to produce a significant improvement in the traffic conditions of the road network reducing the total travel time experienced by vehicles simulated under dual and multiple peak traffic scenarios. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.