Analysis of delays at exhaustive traffic signals based on polling models

In this paper we study a traffic intersection with vehicle-actuated traffic signal control. Traffic lights stay green until all lanes within a group are emptied. Assuming general renewal arrival processes, we derive exact limiting distributions of the delays under Heavy Traffic (HT) conditions. Furthermore, we derive the Light Traffic (LT) limit of the mean delays for intersections with Poisson arrivals, and develop a heuristic adaptation of this limit to capture the LT behaviour for other interarrival-time distributions. We combine the LT and HT results to develop closed-form approximations for the mean delays of vehicles in each lane. These closed-form approximations are quite accurate, very insightful and simple to implement.