A Petri Net-Based Traffic Rerouting System by Adopting Traffic Lights and Dynamic Message Signs

This paper designs a rerouting system for preventing large-scale urban traffic congestion by adopting traffic lights and dynamic message signs. The system can not only stop the vehicles driving toward the traffic jams but also recommend vehicles of driving to some directions at signalized intersections or the U-turn road section. As a visual and mathematical formalism of modeling discrete-event dynamic systems, timed Petri nets (TPNs) can describe the control and cooperation of traffic lights and dynamic message signs. The behavioral properties of the rerouting system such as reachability, boundedness, liveness, and reversibility are verified based on TPN. Besides, the correctness of the system without any traffic flow conflict is ensured. A case study is given to illustrate our method.