Using Automated Planning for Traffic Signals Control

Abstract

Solving traffic congestions represents a high priority issue in many big cities. Traditional traffic control systems are mainly based on pre-programmed, reactive and local techniques. This paper presents an autonomic system that uses automated planning techniques instead. These techniques are easily configurable and modified, and can reason about the future implications of actions that change the default traffic lights behaviour. The proposed implemented system includes some autonomic properties, since it monitors the current traffic state, detects if the system is degrading its performance, sets up new sets of goals to be achieved by the planner, triggers the planner that generates plans with control actions, and executes the selected courses of actions. The obtained results in several artificial and real world data-based simulation scenarios show that the proposed system can efficiently solve traffic congestion.