We present in this article a semi-decentralized approach for urban traffic
control, based on the TUC (Traffic responsive Urban Control) strategy. We
assume that the control is centralized as in the TUC strategy, but we introduce
a contention time window inside the cycle time, where antagonistic stages
alternate a priority rule. The priority rule is set by applying green colours
for given stages and yellow colours for antagonistic ones, in such a way that
the stages with green colour have priority over the ones with yellow colour.
The idea of introducing this time window is to reduce the red time inside the
cycle, and by that, increase the capacity of the network junctions. In
practice, the priority rule could be applied using vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) or
vehicle-to-infrastructure (v2i) communications. The vehicles having the
priority pass almost normally through the junction, while the others reduce
their speed and yield the way. We propose a model for the dynamics and the
control of such a system. The model is still formulated as a linear quadratic
problem, for which the feedback control law is calculated off-line, and applied
in real time. The model is implemented using the Simulation of Urban MObility
(SUMO) tool in a small regular (American-like) network configuration. The
results are presented and compared to the classical TUC strategy.Comment: 16 page