Adaptation Scheduling for Urban Traffic Lights via FNT-Based Prediction of Traffic Flow

Abstract

By linking computational intelligence technology directly to urban transportation systems, a framework for scheduling traffic lights is proposed to enhance their flexibility in adaptation to traffic fluctuation. First, based on the flexible neural tree (FNT) theory, an algorithm for predicting the traffic flow is designed to obtain the variance tendency of traffic load. After that, a strategy for adjusting the duration of traffic signal cycle is designed to tackle the problem of overload or lightweight traffic flow in the next-time frame. While predetermining the duration of signal cycle in the next-time frame, from a utilization perspective, an elastic-adaption strategy for scheduling the separate phase’s green traffic lights is derived from the analytical solution, which is obtained from a designed trade-off scheduling optimization problem to increase the adaptability for the upcoming traffic flow. The experiment results show that the proposed framework can effectively reduce the delay and stopping rate of vehicles, and improves the adaptability for the upcoming traffic flow.