A Performative Control Approach to Day-to-Day Traffic Signal Retiming

This collaboration with Xinwu Qian, of Rice University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, draws on his expertise in transportation systems and performative control. It extends methodologies developed over the past several years in Santiago Segarra’s research group for intelligent wireless networking to transportation systems.

This is the first research paper by lead author Shuchang Jiang, an undergraduate student at Rice University.

Abstract

Conventional fixed-time traffic signal optimization and recent day-to-day signal retiming generally model route adaptation under prescribed route-choice behavior and origin–destination (OD) demand, while neglecting the fact that travelers’ behavior can be performative to the signal control policy. A signal timing policy learned from historical traffic observations must therefore account for how its own deployment changes the distribution on which it will be evaluated in the future. We formulate this problem as performative signal control under observed traveler responses and characterize performative stability of the coupled policy–demand system. We propose incremental day-to-day retiming using the local policy gradient at the current operating point, estimated offline through simulation-based zeroth-order optimization without an explicit day-to-day demand-response model. This gradual approach provides a feasible path for policy and demand to co-evolve toward stability. Experiments on a downtown Denver network show that our approach improves congestion, throughput, and stability, generalizes across different demand levels, and remains effective when the offline simulator contains mismatched travel demand and routing behaviors.

• Preprint
• Source code available soon