This paper proposes a double pressure (DP) signal control strategy that takes into account finite link storage capacity. Two types of pressure measures, including an endogenous and an exogenous pressure, are defined. The endogenous pressure is associated with the estimated exit-flow during a signal phase in the next time period, while the exogenous pressure is a virtual pressure associated with the downstream links. The properties of the proposed signal control strategy, including localized waiting time minimization and queue length stabilization at each isolated intersection were discussed. The performance of the proposed signal control strategy was evaluated with two testing networks via simulation, including a network with an isolated signalized intersection and a network with multiple signalized intersections. We compared the performance of the proposed DP control strategy with three existing strategies, including the fixed signal control, adaptive signal control and a back-pressure algorithm based control strategy proposed by previous studies. The test results show promise of the proposed DP control strategy in improving network travel time and queue stability when compared with several state-of-art decentralized control strategies, even though we acknowledge that future efforts in extending the decentralized strategy towards a better system-wide coordination are warranted.

Key words: Decentralized signal control, Link storage capacity, Double queue model, Waiting time minimization, Queue length stability