A Simulation Study on Max Pressure Control of Signalized Intersections

In this paper, a decentralized traffic signal control strategy named max pressure control is reviewed and examined. This control strategy aims at optimizing overall network throughputs, but applies a distributed approach that only requires local information to generate timing plans for each intersection. A Vissim simulation study is conducted to compare existing max pressure schemes. The results show that a recently proposed cyclic-based approach performs more poorly than the original non-cyclic approach. Further, to address two issues that hinder existing schemes: frequent changes of phase and queue spillover/blockage, two modifications are suggested. The simulation reveals that network performance can be improved after modifications.