In the past few decades, intelligent traffic controllers have been developed to responsively cope with the increasing traffic demands and congestions in urban traffic networks. Various studies to compare and evaluate the performance of traffic controllers have been conducted to investigate its effect on traffic performances such as its ability to reduce delay time, stops, throughputs and queues within a traffic network. In this paper, the authors aim to present another comparative study on heuristics versus meta-heuristics traffic control methods. To our knowledge, such comparison has not been conducted and could provide insights into a purely heuristic controller compared to meta-heuristics. The study aims to answer the research question “Can heuristics traffic control strategies outperformed meta-heuristics in terms of performance and computational costs?” For this purpose, a heuristics model-based control strategy (MCS) which was previously developed by the authors is compared to genetic algorithms (GA) and evolution strategy (ES) respectively on a nine intersections symmetric network. These control strategies were implemented via simulations on a traffic simulator called UTNSim for three different types of traffic scenarios. Performance indices such as average delays, vehicle throughputs and the computational time of these controllers were evaluated. The results revealed that the heuristic MCS outperformed GA and ES with superior performance in average delays whereas vehicle throughputs were in close agreement. The computation time of the MCS is also feasible for real-time application compared to GA and ES that has longer convergent time.

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