In this paper, a novel centralized traffic network model is proposed to describe the urban traffic light scheduling problem (UTLSP) in a traffic network. The objective is to minimize the network-wise total delay time of all vehicles in a fixed time window. To overcome the potentially high computational complexity involved in UTLSP, an improved artificial bee colony (IABC) algorithm is proposed. A new solution generating strategy and three local search operators corresponding to different neighborhood structures of UTLSP are proposed to improve the performance of IABC. Extensive computational experiments are carried out using sixteen instances with different problem- scales. The IABC with and without three local search operators are evaluated and compared. The comparisons and discussions show the competitiveness of IABC for solving UTLSP.
