Review of Bio-inspired computations on optimisation of traffic signals

Many novel studies have explored the context of vehicular traffic to make it less congested, safer, more economical and emit less pollution to the environment. Because of the explosion of data and improving performance of computational powers, bio-inspired algorithms have lately gained great traction in the scientific community. On the other hand, this popularity has not been extended to the domain of traffic control as such. Moreover, signalized intersections, where traffic controllers are mostly installed, have received even a lesser number of publications pertaining to bio-inspired algorithms. This paper addresses this gap through reviewing the published journals pertaining to bio-inspired algorithms applied in optimizing signalized intersections. This paper reviews the journal papers that study and propose new algorithms and methods in optimizing traffic signals using bio-inspired algorithms. Each algorithm is introduced: (i) the similarity between the natural behaviour of biological organisms and its computational one; (ii) the contributions of the paper; (iii) the strong and weak points of each paper in a chronological order. We then give a summary of all the existing bio-inspired algorithms and in which domain they have been implemented. This gives the scientific community the opportunity to determine the gaps and why not all bio-inspired algorithms have been explored in optimizing traffic signals.