Self‐organizing traffic lights at multiple‐street intersections

The elementary cellular automaton following rule 184 can mimic particles flowing in one direction at a constant speed. Therefore, this automaton can model highway traffic qualitatively. In a recent paper, we have incorporated intersections regulated by traffic lights to this model using exclusively elementary cellular automata. In such a paper, however, we only explored a rectangular grid. We now extend our model to more complex scenarios using an hexagonal grid. This extension shows first that our model can readily incorporate multiple‐way intersections and hence simulate complex scenarios. In addition, the current extension allows us to study and evaluate the behavior of two different kinds of traffic‐light controller for a grid of six‐way streets allowing for either two‐ or three‐street intersections: a traffic light that tries to adapt to the amount of traffic (which results in self‐organizing traffic lights) and a system of synchronized traffic lights with coordinated rigid periods (sometimes called the “green‐wave” method). We observe a tradeoff between system capacity and topological complexity. The green‐wave method is unable to cope with the complexity of a higher‐capacity scenario, while the self‐organizing method is scalable, adapting to the complexity of a scenario and exploiting its maximum capacity. Additionally, in this article, we propose a benchmark, independent of methods and models, to measure the performance of a traffic‐light controller comparing it against a theoretical optimum. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2012