prob016: traffic lights

proposed by  Toby Walsh
tw@cs.york.ac.uk

Specification

Consider a four way traffic junction with eight traffic lights. Four of the traffic lights are for the vehicles and can be represented by the variables V1 to V4 with domains {r,ry,g,y} (for red, red-yellow, green and yellow). The other four traffic lights are for the pedestrians and can be represented by the variables P1 to P4 with domains {r,g}.

The constraints on these variables can be modelled by quaternary constraints on (Vi, Pi, Vj, Pj ) for 1<=i<=4, j=(1+i)mod 4 which allow just the tuples {(r,r,g,g), (ry,r,y,r), (g,g,r,r), (y,r,ry,r)}.

It would be interesting to consider other types of junction (e.g. five roads intersecting) as well as modelling the evolution over time of the traffic light sequence.