A Model with Traffic Routers, Dynamically Managing Signal Phases to Address Traffic Congestion in Real Time

Abstract

On-road Vehicular traffic congestion has detrimental effect on three lifelines: Economy, Productivity and Pollution (EPP). With ever increasing population of vehicles on road, traffic congestion is a major challenge to the economy, productivity and pollution, notwithstanding continuous developments in alternative fuels, alternative sources of energy. The research develops accurate and precise model in real time which computes congestion detection, dynamic signaling algorithm to evenly distribute vehicle densities while ensuring avoidance of starvation and deadlock situation. The model incorporates road segment length and breadth, quality and achievable average speed to compute road capacity. Vehicles installed with GPS enabled devices provide their location, which enables computing road occupancy. Road occupancy is evaluated based on number of vehicles as well as area occupied by vehicles. Ratio of road occupancy and road capacity provides congestion index important to compute signal phases. The algorithm ensures every direction is serviced once during a signaling cycle ensuring no starvation. Secondly, the definition of minimum and maximum signal timings ensures against dead lock situation. A simulator is developed to validate the proposition and proves it can ease congestion by more than 50% which is better than any of the contemporary approaches offering 15% improvement. In case of higher congestion index, alternate routes are suggested based on evaluation of traffic density graphs for shortest route or knowledge database. The algorithm to compute shortest route is optimized drastically, reducing computation cost to 3 2N * vis-à-vis computation cost of N 2 by classical algorithms. The proposal brings down the cost of implementation per traffic junction from USD 30,000 to USD 2000.