A Comparison of a Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing Applied to a Traffic Light Control Problem : A Traffic Intersection Optimization Problem

This work compares a Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) when applied to a variant of the Traffic Light Control Problem (TLCP). TLCP is about controlling the lights in one or more traffic intersections in order to optimize traffic flow. This is important in order for society to function properly. The idea is that to solve this problem quickly, as would be necessary in a real traffic situation, stochastic search algorithms like SA and GA should be used. GA and SA in particular are chosen because they are often used in previous work.A 4-way traffic intersection is simulated. GA and SA are used to find a schedule for lighting the traffic lights in such a way that for a given collection of cars, the traffic flow is maximized. The goal is to study how traffic flows in the solutions produced by GA and SA when the problem size increases.The conclusion of this work is that SA seems to generally finds better solutions than GA in small search spaces and that SA and GA are comparable in larger search spaces.