An Efficient Adaptive Traffic Light Control System for Urban Road Traffic Congestion Reduction in Smart Cities

Traffic lights have been used for decades to control and manage traffic flows crossing road intersections to increase traffic efficiency and road safety. However, relying on fixed time cycles may not be ideal in dealing with the increasing congestion level in cities. Therefore, we propose a new Adaptive Traffic Light Control System (ATLCS) to assist traffic management authorities in efficiently dealing with traffic congestion in cities. The main idea of our ATLCS consists in synchronizing a number of traffic lights controlling consecutive junctions by creating a delay between the times at which each of them switches to green in a given direction. Such a delay is dynamically updated based on the number of vehicles waiting at each junction, thereby allowing vehicles leaving the city centre to travel a long distance without stopping (i.e., minimizing the number of occurrences of the `stop and go’ phenomenon), which in turn reduces their travel time as well. The performance evaluation of our ATLCS has shown that the average travel time of vehicles traveling in the synchronized direction has been significantly reduced (by up to 39%) compared to non-synchronized fixed time Traffic Light Control Systems. Moreover, the overall achieved improvement across the simulated road network was 17%

Introduction of vehicle communication and intelligent traffic management systems

Nowadays, the vehicle industry is heading for a significant change. There are fundamental debates about what type of drive would be ideal for vehicles in terms of environmental awareness, because environmental protection has become one of the main directions in vehicle production, especially due to the fluctuating raw material sources in today's uncertain situation. Another issue that is at least as important is traffic safety. Almost everyone agrees that the way to safer traffic is mainly through the development of vehicle communication. This is a direction that develops in all vehicles, regardless of drive, construction, or performance. There are several types of vehicle communication systems, but it is not easy to categorize these systems, as it is difficult to clearly separate them, as there are quite large overlaps between them. This article provides an overview of these vehicle communication systems