Schedule a 4-way stop
Python, 1219 Bytes

I didn't spend very much time/effort trying to golf this, but I might improve it if other answers start popping up.  I use A* search with an admissible heuristic, guaranteeing optimality.  I am pretty sure (although I haven't bothered to confirm) that the heuristic is also consistent, meaning that it is O(dynamic programming).

The program reads in four lines from STDIN in the format you have specified, and prints the result to STDOUT, also in the format you specified.

from heapq import heappush,heappop
from itertools import combinations
N,E,S,W=range(4)
L="L"
R="R"
T="S"
d=[{L:E,R:W,T:S},{L:S,R:N,T:W},{L:W,R:E,T:N},{L:N,R:S,T:E}]
b=set([(N,S,W,E),(N,S,E,W),(S,N,W,E),(S,N,E,W),(E,W,N,E),(N,S,W,N),(S,N,E,S),(W,E,S,W)])
for x in list(b):b.add(x[2:]+x[:2])
def v(*a):return a[1]!=a[3] and a not in b
i=lambda:raw_input()+'\n'
i=map(lambda l:map(lambda e:("NESW"[l[0]],d[l[0]][e]), l[1]),enumerate((i()+i()+i()+i()).split()))
q=[]
heappush(q,(0,[],i))
while q:
    h,a,n=heappop(q)
    m=sum(map(bool,n))
    if m==0:
        print "\n".join(a)
        break
    for r in range(4,0,-1):
        f=False
        for c in combinations(range(4),r):
            l=True
            for i in c:
                if not n[i]:
                    l=False
                    break
            if not l:continue
            l=True
            for x,y in combinations(c,2):
                if not v(x,n[x][0][1],y,n[y][0][1]):
                    l = False
                    break
            if l==False:continue
            f=True
            e=list(n)
            for i in c:e[i]=e[i][1:]
            heappush(q,(m-r+min(map(len,e)),a+["".join([n[x][0][0] for x in c])],e))
        if f:break


Example usage:

$ time echo "RRLLSSRLSLLSSLRSLR\nRLSLRLSLSSRLRLRRLLSSRLR\nRLSLRLRRLSSLSLLRLSSL\nLLLRRRSSRSLRSSSSLLRRRR" | python 4way.py
NES
NEW
NSW
NS
NS
ESW
NS
NES
NEW
NS
NES
NSW
NS
NS
NSW
NW
NS
NS
NS
EW
ES
SW
EW
EW
SW
ES
EW
EW
EW
EW
E
EW
EW
EW
EW
EW
E
EW
echo   0.00s user 0.00s system 38% cpu 0.002 total
python 4way.py  0.02s user 0.01s system 90% cpu 0.030 total