Decentralized signal control for urban road networks

•We propose a novel decentralized traffic signal control strategy based on the so-called BackPressure policy.•The strategy implements cyclic phases while retaining the stability property.•We prove that the stability results still apply with unbiased turning fraction estimation.•The numerical results showed superior performance both in terms of throughput and congestion.

We propose in this paper a decentralized traffic signal control policy for urban road networks. Our policy is an adaptation of a so-called BackPressure scheme which has been widely recognized in data network as an optimal throughput control policy. We have formally proved that our proposed BackPressure scheme, with fixed cycle time and cyclic phases, stabilizes the network for any feasible traffic demands. Simulation has been conducted to compare our BackPressure policy against other existing distributed control policies in various traffic and network scenarios. Numerical results suggest that the proposed policy can surpass other policies both in terms of network throughput and congestion.