English

Capacity-aware back-pressure traffic signal control

Systems and Control 2014-04-23 v3

Abstract

The control of a network of signalized intersections is considered. Previous work demonstrates that the so-called back-pressure control provides stability guarantees, assuming infinite queues capacities. In this paper, we highlight the failing of current back-pressure control under finite capacities by identifying sources of non work-conservation and congestion propagation. We propose the use of a normalized pressure which guarantees work conservation and mitigates congestion propagation, while ensuring fairness at low traffic densities, and recovering original back-pressure as capacities grow to infinity. This capacity-aware back-pressure control allows to improve performance as congestion increases, as indicated by simulation results, and keeps the key benefits of back-pressure: ability to be distributed over intersections and O(1) complexity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1309.6484,
  title  = {Capacity-aware back-pressure traffic signal control},
  author = {Jean Gregoire and Xiangjun Qian and Emilio Frazzoli and Arnaud de La Fortelle and Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1309.6484},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

9 pages, submitted to IEEE TCNS

R2 v1 2026-06-22T01:33:44.301Z