Design of Regulatory Traffic Light Control Systems with Synchronized Timed Petri Nets

Fixing the phases is one of the common methods to control an urban traffic network. Once a road is filled with a high traffic flow approaching its capacity, the conventional traffic light controller is not able to handle this traffic congestion phenomenon well. In this paper, we propose a novel regulatory traffic light control system to handle such traffic congestion by using synchronized timed Petri nets (STPNs). Three kinds of intersections in an urban traffic network are defined and employed to demonstrate our new regulatory traffic light control system models. Finally, the liveness and reversibility of the proposed STPN models are proven through the reachability graph analysis method. To our knowledge, this is the first work that solves a traffic congestion problem with a regulatory traffic light control technique that is effective in preventing vehicles from entering traffic congestion zones.