A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach to Collaborative Intersection Management and Control

As urban population increases steadily, current mobility and transportation services become inefficient, needing an urgent improvement since they represent a major source of discomfort and economic losses. In this context, the concept of intelligent transportation systems takes relevance as a way of optimizing those services with the use of technology. This work proposes a cyber-physical systems approach to collaborative urban traffic control. Specifically, a three-layer architecture is proposed to address the intersection management problem, making use of modular cyber-physical object abstractions and timed Petri nets. Preliminary implementations in a pseudo-real environment show that the proposed system is capable of handling the communication and processing loads, while improving traffic performance with respect to classical solutions for traffic signals, outperforming timed, Webster and coordinated control methods in pilot-scale tests.