Optimal control of traffic light signals using stochastic simulation

Traffic congestion is one of the serious problems facing modern cities, posing a huge challenge to peoples travel and urban development. And it has been proved that traffic lights should be responsible for the congestion instead of too many cars on the road occasionally. So it is very important to find the optimal control of the traffic light signal. The purpose of this experiment is to explore ways to optimally control traffic light signals in order to reduce the average waiting time for people and vehicles at intersections. This paper used a stochastic simulation approach, based on an assumed Poisson process and Gamma distribution, to simulate the specific time for vehicles and pedestrians to arrive at the intersection over the course of an hour, and used this to calculate the average waiting time. We investigated the effect of the duration of red and green lights on the average waiting time and wrote the corresponding code for simulation and calculation through MATLAB. The experimental results show that shorter red light duration and moderate green light duration can achieve optimal results when there are more cars. On the contrary, shorter green light duration and moderate red light duration can achieve optimal results when there are more pedestrians. We reached this conclusion through experiments and evaluated the hypotheses in the experiments.