Data parallelism in traffic control tables with arrival information

Abstract

Traffic lights can be controlled dynamically through rules reacting on the number of waiting vehicles at each light. A rule can be captured by a so-called Traffic Control Table (TCT). The Value Iteration method from Stochastic Dynamic Programming has been used for simple networks to derive a TCT. This work studies the generation of a TCTbased rule that takes the arrival information of new vehicles into account. The question is how to generate such a table for simple intersections (or a network of these). The generation is particularly difficult due to the computational work involved in the Value Iteration process. The problem is formulated as a Markov Decision Process and the parallelization of the Value Iteration method for this problem is discussed. We are specifically interested in exploiting the structure of the problem for simple infrastructures, with only a few traffic lanes, using a parallel algorithm.