Driving an intelligent car but irritated stuck in traffic!!! A red light signal is no more sufficient to handle and co-operate with today’s vehicles. In this era of IoT and smart telecom consumers need more, perhaps a “Intelligent traffic control system” that can control traffic based on realistic situations. Electronics Maker presents you this exclusive article on smart traffic management systems, you see on your office route very soon…
The continuous increase in the congestion level on public roads, especially at rush hours, is a critical problem in many countries and is becoming a major concern to transportation specialists and decision makers. The existing methods for traffic management, surveillance and control are not adequately efficient in terms of the performance, cost, and the effort needed for maintenance and support. Intelligent Traffic Control System is no more a luxury with increasing vehicles on roads, life running on minutes count and intelligent cars availability. Talking about advantages it not only manages regular traffic to go smooth but could also warn cars to avoid rushy routes through V2V communication or making way for emergency vehicles or connecting road with medical services in case of emergency.
India is the second most populous country in the World and is a fast growing economy. It is seeing terrible road congestion problems in its cities. Infrastructure growth is slow as compared to the growth in number of vehicles, due to space and cost constraints. Also, Indian traffic is non-lane based and chaotic. It needs a traffic control solutions, which are different from the developed Countries. Intelligent management of traffic flows can reduce the negative impact of congestion. In recent years, wireless networks are widely used in the road transport as they provide more cost effective options. Technologies like ZigBee, RFID and GSM can be used in traffic control to provide cost effective solutions. RFID is a wireless
Technology that uses radio frequency electromagnetic energy to carry information between the RFID tag and RFID reader. Some RFID systems will only work within the range inches or centimeters, while others may work for 100 meters (300 feet) or more.
Traffic congestion is a major problem in cities of developing Countries like India. Growth in urban population and the middle-class segment contribute significantly to the rising number of vehicles in the cities. Congestion on roads eventually results in slow moving traffic, which increases the time of travel, thus stands-out as one of the major issues in metropolitan cities. In, green wave system was discussed, which was used to provide clearance to any emergency vehicle by turning all the red lights to green on the path of the emergency vehicle, hence providing a complete green wave to the desired vehicle. A ‘green wave’ is the synchronization of the green phase of traffic signals. With a ‘green wave’ setup, a vehicle passing through a green signal will continue to receive green signals as it travels down the road. In addition to the green wave path, the system will track a stolen vehicle when it passes through a traffic light. Advantage of the system is that GPS inside the vehicle does not require additional power. The biggest disadvantage of green waves is that, when the wave is disturbed, the disturbance can cause traffic problems that can be exacerbated by the synchronization
In such cases, the queue of vehicles in a green wave grows in size until it becomes too large and some of
the vehicles cannot reach the green lights in time and must stop. This is called over-saturation. In, the use of RFID traffic control to avoid problems that usually arise with standard traffic control systems, especially those related to image processing and beam interruption techniques are discussed. This
RFID technique deals with multivehicle, multilane, multi road junction areas. It provides an efficient time management scheme, in which, a dynamic time schedule is worked out in real time for the passage of each traffic column. The real time operation of the system emulates the judgment of a traffic policeman on duty. The number of vehicles in each column and the routing are proprieties, upon which the calculations and the judgments are done.
The disadvantage of this work is that it does not discuss what methods are used for communication between the emergency vehicle and the traffic signal controller. In, it proposed a RFID and GPS based automatic lane clearance system for ambulance. The focus of this work is to reduce the delay in arrival of the ambulance to the hospital by automatically clearing the lane, in which, ambulance is travelling, before it reaches the traffic signal. This can be achieved by turning the traffic signal, in the path of the ambulance, to green when the ambulance is at a certain distance from the traffic junction. The use of RFID distinguishes between the emergency and non-emergency cases, thus preventing unnecessary traffic congestion. The communication between the ambulance and traffic signal post is done through the transceivers and GPS. The system is fully automated and requires no human intervention at the traffic junctions. The disadvantage of this system is it needs all the information about the starting point, end point of the travel. It may not work; if the ambulance needs to take another route for some reasons or if the starting point is not known in advance. Traffic is a critical issue of transportation system in most of all the cities of Countries. This is especially true for Countries like India and China, where the population is increasing at higher rate. For example, Bangalore city, has witnessed a phenomenal growth in vehicle population in recent years. As a result, many of the arterial roads and intersections are operating over the capacity (i.e., v/c is more than 1) and average journey speeds on some of the key roads in the central areas are lower than 10 Km/h at the peak hour. In, some of the main challenges are management of more than 36,00,000 vehicles, annual growth of 7–10% in traffic, roads operating at higher capacity ranging from 1 to 4, travel speed IDEA
less than 10 Km/h at some central areas in peak hours, insufficient or no parking space for vehicles, limited number of policemen. In, currently video traffic surveillance and monitoring system commissioned in Bangalore city. It involves a manual analysis of data by the traffic management team to determine the traffic light duration in each of the junction. It will communicate the same to the local police officers for the necessary actions
Existing traffic control system
– Present system is completely a static case
– Vehicles must wait at the intersection for a predefined time until microcontroller switches green light for that lane.
– Exists no process of preemption.
– No green light service for priority based vehicles.
– No alarm/call for emergency
– No V2V Communication
From the past decades, management of traffic has been one of the biggest issues of modernization.
Researchers have followed a long way to overcome the traffic crises. Right from the very beginning of,
“Manual Traffic Control” in which man power was required to control the traffic. Depending on countries and states the traffic polices are allotted to different areas to control traffic. These men carry sign board, sign light and whistle to control the traffic. They are instructed to wear specific uniforms in order to be easily identified by the drivers. After this came the traditional “Vehicle Actuated Control System” in which, lights are loaded with constant numerical value in the form of timers. The lights are automatically getting ON and OFF depending on timer value changes. The main disadvantage is that the algorithm for this control system does not change the green signal even if the traffic has already passed until the counter is complete, while not taking into account the number of vehicles waiting at red. Hence the density of the traffic does not matter. Next in generation is the “Automatic Traffic Light”, which is the modified version of vehicle actuated control system with addition to timers and electrical sensors. In this technique electronic and electrical sensors are added to detect vehicles and produce signals that the time is being wasted by a green light on an empty road. The established traffic control management systems are inadequate for handling huge amount of traffic load as they are incapable of meeting the growing number of vehicles on road. Drawbacks to these particular controlling methods:-
- Only skilled operators can make suitable judgment and decisions because sometimes the situation is very complicated and many factors are needed to be considered.
- The operator is under very high work load as he has to continuously take decisions and review the traffic conditions at small intervals of time.
Solar Based Intelligent Traffic Lights Control System
Traffic congestion is one of the pressing issues in Gaborone. One of the major limitations is unreliable power supply due to frequent power cuts which renders any programmed controllers ineffective and drivers have to resort to basic junction traffic flow rules, leading to adverse congestions. Most importantly, the traffic controller programming are on static timings regardless of time of day, traffic count, or even priority lanes.
Ultimately, police officers have been deployed to key traffic junctions for congestion mitigations. By observation, they are quite efficient but this deprives the Police Department of the necessary resources to attend to more pressing issues. Moreover, they can only help when the weather permits, or at specific times who do not necessarily attend to all possible congestions. The implementation of ICT and Electronics to a transportation system is termed Intelligent Transport System (ITS). BITRI proposes the deployment of smart sensor systems with intelligent algorithms to automatically adapt and even predict traffic flow for a seamless transportation experience for all. The solution is indigenous and models the behavioral patterns of the ever-trusty police-man as a tribute to their efficiency and utmost helpfulness. It further builds on this with green wave predictions to avoid unnecessary stops. To circumvent the power issue, solar energy is harnessed to ensure 24/7 operation, while wireless vehicle gadgets distribute critical transport data to drivers for informative decisions. The proposed system ensures a green wave for priority fleet such as ambulances and presidential fleets.
Transforming the way traffic moves
Allow prioritizing of vehicles
For vehicles such as an ambulance or a government vehicle, the sensor clock reading for each such vehicle takes a very large value. As a result, the vehicles on that road would be allowed DEA to move first.
Automatic road block detection
An anomalous increase in the sensor clock counts at any point in time means that an incident that is blocking the road has occurred. Identifying the sensor corresponding to this anomalous increase can also help pin-point the location of occurrence of the block.
Highly adaptive in real time
In traffic management, typically the quality of a road is judged based on certain parameters. The control algorithm is designed accordingly.
However, should these heuristics change over time; the algorithm will be compromising on accuracy.
“The proposed algorithm” easily adapts to such changes, thus always providing an optimal solution.
Accounts for periods of drastically varying traffic conditions
As this algorithm makes use of the number of vehicles present at that instant of time, with the help of sensors, it can efficiently deal with varying traffic. For instance, consider the optimal green signal time, calculated statically is 60 seconds. But, only five vehicles are present in the queue at any point in time; the system automatically adjusts the green signal time based on the number of vehicles, which eliminates the unnecessary delay (unlike in the case of the static calculation system).
Always provides optimal results No matter what the traffic conditions, the algorithm always yields optimal results with a deviation of only 5-8% as compared to the value calculated manually, even if the calculation parameters change dynamically.
Considers real time parameters
In some intelligent traffic control systems, traffic movement is merely dependent on the basic principles such as keeping the signal green as long as there are still vehicles in the current signal, which sometimes may not serve the purpose. But in our system we consider various real time parameters such as vehicle waiting times of every road in the junction to ensure optimum performance.
Economical and computationally simple
Some other proposed systems such as Intelligent cross road traffic management system (ICRTMS) and Mobile Intelligent Traffic Control Systems are dependent on advanced technology; which are both computationally expensive and economically infeasible. In contrast, the system proposed in this paper only involves basic arithmetic computations and a few other subsystems, which determine required parameters such as number of vehicles present, road quality co-efficient etc.
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)
Imagine driving your way through the monstrous bumper to bumper Delhi traffic. Blasting horns, reckless Bluelines, motorcycles whizzing past, endless auto rickshaws, lazy Bullocks vying for space there’s no solution to the complete chaos and madness. It’s just not Delhi’s story, keeping traffic moving is a problem faced globally at all the levels of government. However the good news is that solution may just be round the corner with the implementation of Intelligent Transport System ITS in short. The coming into picture of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) holds promise for a sustainable and balanced transportation solution.
Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) is essentially the application of computer and communications technologies coming in aid of the transport problems. ITS technologies enable gathering of data or intelligence and then providing timely feedback to traffic managers and road-users. ITS results in improved safety to drivers, better traffic efficiency, reduced traffic congestion, improved energy efficiency and environmental quality and enhanced economic productivity. Some examples of ITS include Advanced Traffic Management Systems, Advanced Traveller Information Systems, Advanced Vehicle Control Systems, Electronic Toll Collection Systems, Advanced Transportation Systems et al. ITS endeavour for Indian cities is initiated with collaborative projects between the department and research and academic institutions having requisite expertise. As part of this ambitious programme 8 sub projects have been identified by CDAC, with IITs (Chennai and Mumbai) and IIM, Kolkata as the other participating agencies. These 8 state- of- the-art sub projects have been initiated for development and demonstration through field implementation to the end users. As part of this project an embedded Centre of Excellence on ITS will be created at CDAC, Thiruvananthapuram, which would function as a national resource centre in the country. Towards this objective, necessary infrastructure will be created through this project at the Nodal Centre. These technologies will be made available to the interested industries for their commercial exploitation. Here’s a table of the 8 ITS
Sub projects and the likely end-users. C-DAC in the area of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) focuses on traffic control, traffic monitoring and traffic information system suitable for Indian conditions covering urban traffic control system, Area traffic control system, Wireless traffic control system, Red light violation detection system,
Vehicle tracking system and Smart parking solutions. C-DAC has developed and deployed a number of ITS solutions in various cities in India including Indore, Jaipur, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram. The modules of ITS:
- Urban Traffic Control Systems
- Vehicle Tracking Systems
- Smart Parking
- Intelligent Red light Violation Identification System
- Wireless Traffic Controller
- Intelligent Parking Lot Management System
- SPARK = Smart PARKing
- SAVER = Safety Alert & Advisory Information system using VEhiculaR Communication
- Traffic Counting and Classifier
- WiTraC Compatible Adaptive Traffic Control System
- Traffic Signal Monitoring and Management Software
Advanced Traffic Management System by Efkon India
Advance Traffic Management System (ATMS) solution is provided by Efkon India with an objective to ensure safety, reduced and hassle-free travel time, and aided by the comforts of a world class infrastructure. Over the highway, it becomes an absolute necessity to monitor incidents proactively and take pre-emptive actions or a timely and prompt reactive measures should be present using modern technologies to minimize or eradicate the effects of unavoidable disasters.
The main aim of our Advance Traffic Management System is to provide traffic management solutions that enable private concessionaires, highway operators or government authorities to take actions that ultimately result in improving the safety of road users along with improving the traffic flow, increase transportation system efficiency, increase economic productivity and enhance mobility.
Our advance traffic management system continuously monitors the expressway/ highway stretch providing valuable feedback and information to the Central Control Room to take suitable actions. The functioning of ATMS is seen in relation to how an operations company manages the highway.
Sub-modules of a ITS:
- a) Access Control, Surveillance and Security
- b) Bridge Building, Maintenance and Management
- c) Detection, Classification and Vehicle Counters
- d) Fleet Management, Positioning and Tracking
- e) Guardrails, Barriers and Attenuators
- f) Highway Infrastructure, Construction and
Maintenance
- g) IT, Computing and Software
- h) Lighting Solutions
- i) Machine Vision and Image Processing
- j) Parking
- k) Photo Enforcement
- l) Project Management and Consultancy
- m) Road Marking
- n) Static and Electronic Signage
- o) Test and Measurement
- p) Tolling and Payment Systems
- q) Traffic Management
- r) Traffic Signal Preemption
- s) Tunnelling and Tunnel Maintenance
- An acquisition of information regarding the traffic or road users’ status (e.g. traffic hold-up, DEA
accidents, medical emergency, vehicle breakdown, hazardous weather condition etc.) is processed to the road management (operations) company , like concessionaire or highway management company
- Subsequent decision making is done by the concessionaire or highway management company based on the above information. These decisions are normally guided by their standard procedures and policies (e.g. to send a patrol vehicle to regulate traffic, send an ambulance to the accident site etc.). Also, traffic or weather related information is displayed at Variable Message Signboards to inform to the commuters.
Optionally, road user portal and mobile apps are also used for effective communication to the users
- Valuable information is collected for concessionaire or highway Management Company (e.g. Traffic count and classification, weather conditions).
- Some specific enforcement system on the road users, as per the Traffic Guideline can also be added in this ATMS solution
NXP Semiconductors and Siemens on Intelligent Traffic Management
Systems Partnership
NXP Semiconductors and Siemens AG announced a partnership for secure, intelligent vehicle networking. Siemens will use technology from NXP Semiconductors and Cohda Wireless for secure communication of vehicles with surrounding traffic infrastructure. Siemens will deploy NXP technology for various ITS field tests and pilot projects, including the A58 motorway in the Netherlands, A9 motorway in Germany, and the Living Lab in Austria.
Siemens expects to globally deploy transport infrastructure such as overhead sign gantries and traffic lights in its roadside units (RSUs). RSUs are 802.11p WLAN-based radio modules that reliably and securely transmit information such as speed limits, warnings of icy roads or other dangerous situations, traffic jams and construction warnings within a fraction of a second to passing vehicles and traffic control centers. The successful adoption of vehicle to infrastructure technologies is expected to significantly reduce traffic congestion, reduces vehicle accidents and lower auto-related pollution.
NXP will be a strategic supplier to Siemens of the secure WLAN-based radio chipsets for the roadside units. NXP is the leading provider of automotive radio chipsets, enabling both vehicle to vehicle communication (“ V2V ”) and vehicle to infrastructure (“V2I”) communication. NXP’s V2V and V2I products have built-in harden security elements to ensure personal data privacy, prevent hacking or the manipulation of the vehicle and infrastructure systems. Cohda Wireless, of which
NXP is a major shareholder, provides hardware and software development services and products for the roadside units, based on Siemens’ long-standing
ITS knowhow and development specifications. Cohda also ensures maximum communication reliability and quality, even in challenging reception conditions such as between tall buildings.
“Siemens has devoted years developing traffic signals systems and communication modules designed for optimum interaction between car and intelligent infrastructure. The RoadLINK portfolio of our new partner NXP includes a high-performance radio chipset with hardware security. As one of the world’s largest automotive semiconductor suppliers, NXP also enhances our infrastructure expertise through the company’s wealth of automotive know-how and strong customer and partner network”, said Daniel Hobohm, Head of Product Lifecycle Management, and Intelligent Traffic Systems at Siemens.
“We are extremely pleased to have Siemens on board as our partner for the growth market of Intelligent Transport Systems. The pilot projects Communicating Cars and Intelligent Traffic Lights for SmartPort Hamburg launched over a year ago marked the beginning of an intensive cooperation, and now we are looking forward to our first business results. Infrastructure equipment providers like Siemens are key growth drivers for V2X technology, as they create unique and directly usable added value for drivers – such as saving time spent in traffic jams. These benefits are especially important in the rollout phase before the technology has been integrated into a critical mass of vehicles”, said Torsten Lehmann, Senior Vice President and Head of Infotainment & Driver Assistance at NXP Semiconductors.
Conclusion
Very soon we may see our roads to be equipped with ITS systems, providing us better traffic control and management.
DESIGN IDEA
