Design of a Distributive Robotic Vehicle Controller for Nigeria Toll Gate

Abstract

Nigeria toll gate was established in 1978 with the objectives of generating income to the Federal Government for the maintenance of the roads and also create employment for Nigerians. However, the tolls were demolished by President Obasanjo’s government on the first of January 2004 at a cost of about #200 to #400 million naira. Among the reasons given were the issue of corruption, traffic congestion and keeping vehicles waiting for long. In 2012, the Buhari led administration re-lunched the toll gates with similar objectives. While the issue of corruption is still on the high side, that of waiting time of vehicle is also a great challenge. This research addresses the waiting time issue by proposing a Distributive Robotic Vehicle Controller (DRVC) for Nigeria toll gate. This DRVC uses counter to count the incoming vehicles on each service lane to know the length of queue of the vehicles. If the length of the queue in any of the lanes reaches the given threshold, then control switches to the lane with smallest queue length. Two approaches were used to demonstrate the proof of concept of the designed system. The first is the mathematical model and the second is the prototype demonstration on the first, we use the Non Preemptive Queuing M/M/c queuing model and on the second a discrete event simulator known as Arena software is used. Evaluation of this work is carried out with the current un-controlled existing system based on waiting time and waiting costs. The result reveal that the proposed DRVC had a better and high waiting time gain difference compared to the un-controlled system Also, we recorded lower waiting costs compared to the conventional un-controlled system. However, at the peak, they almost have the same performance, this is attributed to the fact the threshold of all the lane are reached and more vehicles have to wait. This model is hope to play a significant role in traffic control in our various toll gate in Nigeria Keywords: Robot, vehicle, arrival time, queue length, waiting time