Modelling and Controlling Traffic Behaviour with Continuous Petri Nets

Traffic systems are discrete systems that can be heavilypopulated. One way of overcoming the state explosionproblem inherent to heavily populated discrete systems is torelax the discrete model. Continuous Petri nets (PN) represent arelaxation of the original discrete Petri nets that leads to acompositional formalism to model traffic behaviour. This paper introduces some new features of continuous Petri nets that are useful toobtain realistic but compact models for traffic systems. Combiningthese continuous PN models with discrete PN models of trafficlights leads to a hybrid Petri net model that is appropriate forpredicting traffic behaviour, and for designing traffic lightcontrollers that minimize the total delay of the vehicles in the system.