Modeling and entropy based control of urban transportation network

This paper shows the similarity between transportation networks and thermodynamic systems. In particular, by regarding the vehicles as the energy stored in the system, it is demonstrated that transportation systems can have a similar notion of entropy. This transportation entropy is the measure of disorder and it is not only a suitable notion for evaluating the system performances, but also very useful for the control issue. With this in mind, by using dissipativity approach and choosing the entropy as storage function, a traffic signal control strategy is presented by means of Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI). This generation of dissipativity decreases the disorder and consequently renders the system better organized. Finally, a four-intersection system is studied in order to illustrate the performance of the results. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.