The work presented in this paper concerns a switching-based control formulation for multi-intersection and multiphase traffic light systems. A macroscopic traffic flow modeling approach is first presented, which is instrumental to the development of a model-based and switching-based optimization method for traffic signal operation, in the framework of adaptive dynamic programming (ADP). The main advantage of the switching-based formulation is its capability to determine both 'when' to switch and 'which' mode to switch on without the need to use the cycle-based average flow approximation typical of state-of-the-art formulations. In addition, the framework can handle different cycle times across intersections without the need for synchronization constraints and, moreover, minimum dwell-time constraints can be directly enforced to comply with minimum green/red times in each phase. The simulation experiments on a multi-intersection and multiphase traffic light systems are presented to show the effectiveness of the method.

In this work, we explore the use of a Broad Learning System (BLS) as a way to replace deep learning architectures for traffic flow prediction. BLS is shown to not only outperforms standard learning algorithms (Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), shallow and deep neural networks, stacked autoencoders) in terms of training time, but also in terms of testing accuracy.