MOZART 2 Traffic management through traffic signal control by Quantum-Inspired 3 optimization

Road traffic in cities such as Hamburg is controlled by traffic actuated signals, which, however, do not adapt sufficiently well to highly variable traffic situations. The performance of traffic signals, and hence the whole traffic flow, depends on the quality of their rule-based control logics. Despite extensive efforts by traffic engineers to design each traffic control logic individually, no overall network optimization is performed. The Hamburg Port Authority (HPA) sought new technical ways to improve traffic control throughout the port area by starting to implement a comprehensive traffic management system incorporating new sensor technology. Responding to all detected traffic situations leads to a huge combination of measures over the whole network. With quantum-inspired optimization, HPA is taking a novel approach to continuously finding optimal solutions to problems with a large number of possible scenarios - all within seconds from sensor reading to actuating the signal sequence. This makes it the world's first real-time road network control using quantum-inspired technology.