Optimizing traffic lights by detecting congestion status

Since traffic lights are the only mechanized system at street level, their operation mode affects traffic congestion. There are many works on recognizing traffic congestion and ways of handling traffic to reduce congestion. Traffic light smartification is an algorithm to reduce vehicles general waiting time base on density of traffic flows. This algorithm changes static timing and predetermined timing of the traffic lights, so it can affect the density of traffic at the large scale. By this algorithm, if we consider each direction of streets as a directed weighted edge, vehicles on edges with lower weight may spend more time behind traffic lights, but general waiting time will be reduced. The proposed algorithm is simulated with the help of MATLAB software in order to demonstrate the superiority of this algorithm. As Result, algorithm could act better nearby 10 vehicle/sec to reduce in sparse situation and about 10 vehicle/sec to reduce traffic in dense situation at our imaginary topology in compare with static timing. So simulation results demonstrates performance improvement with the approach outlined.

Keywords:

Traffic Light Controlling , VANET , Graphs , Distributed Systems