Using an example the design of a control algorithm for traffic lights has been presented. As the state of the crossing must be known for an optimal decision, we assumed that there is a device (an observer) which reconstructs the crossing state by receiving sensor-readings of the input events. Given such a device and by using Dynamic Programming for optimisation it is straight forward to develop a control algorithm. Moreover, it has been shown that Branch-and-Bound techniques can be used to reduce the computational complexity. The state space of the problem does not exhibit (explicitly) time. The presented algorithm discretises the infinite timed state space only in points of time where a control input is required
Problems only raised in the paper are subjects of further research: design of an observer, simulation of a crossing to test the controller and the observer, robustness of controllers and observers with respect to unreliable sensor outputs.