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ICTD 2025

Street & Highway Operations

Advances in Mobility and Traffic Control

Exploring Quantum Computing for a Robust Traffic Signal Control

Wednesday, June 11, 2025
10:00 AM – 10:15 AM MT
Abstract: Traffic systems are stochastic due to the randomness from driving behaviors and the day-to-day variations in traffic demand. Majority of the signalized intersections are not equipped with capabilities to adapt the timing to real-time demands due to the cost. The timings to be deployed in the field should not only perform optimal under the scenario that is the same as the time when the data was collected but also perform well when the parameters deviate from the collected data. This requirement calls for stochastic optimization where we optimize a formulated problem with stochastic parameters follow certain distributions.

Quantum computers have the potential to provide faster and more optimal solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. The research team sees the potential for quantum computers to solve stochastic optimization problems efficiently. Special algorithms need to be developed to best use quantum computers to solve the optimization problems. This work explores the use of quantum computing to optimize traffic signal control timings that can perform well under a stochastic environment. The research team identifies a toy problem and formulates a mathematic model to describe the street traffic in the toy problem. We then develop a stochastic mixed integer programming algorithm and encode that algorithm to be run on a quantum computer with the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We evaluate the optimized signal timing with stochastic microscopic simulations under various parameter settings on a traditional high performance computer to show the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Learning Objectives:

Attendees can expect to learn the following from this session:
  • Upon completion, participant will know basic knowledge of quantum computers
  • Upon completion, participant will know basic knowledge of quantum computing
  • Upon completion, participant will know the attempt of using quantum computing to solve traffic signal control problem from NREL.