An Innovative Heuristic for Planning-Based Urban Traffic Control

Santiago Franco, Alan Lindsay, Mauro Vallati, Thomas Lee McCluskey

Abstract: The global growth in urbanisation increases the demand for services including road transport infrastructure, presenting challenges in terms of mobility. In this scenario, optimising the exploitation of urban road network is a pivotal challenge, particularly in the case of unexpected situations. In order to tackle this challenge, approaches based on mixed discrete-continuous planning have been recently proposed and although their feasibility has been demonstrated, there is a lack of informative heuristics for this class of applications. Therefore, existing approaches tend to provide low-quality solutions, leading to a limited impact of generated plans on the actual urban infrastructure.