Evaluation of Decentralized Feedback Traffic Light Control with Dynamic Cycle Length⁎

An established rule of thumb in the field of traffic light control prescribes that, during periods of higher demand, it is convenient to have longer cycles. This is in order to reduce the fraction of the cycle length when no incoming lanes receive green light. In this paper, we simulate a novel, provably stable, decentralized feedback traffic light control policy with variable cycle length. The proposed control strategy is fully decentralized and does not require any information about the network structure or the turning rates. Through simulations on a micro simulator, we compare the performance of our variable cycle length policy to a similar feedback policy with fixed cycle length and with a fixed-time control policy. The simulations show that having dynamic cycle lengths allows one to significantly reduce the overall queue lengths in the network, in both medium and low demands.