Fog-based dynamic traffic light control system for improving public transport

Abstract

Nowadays, traffic congestion is increasingly aggravating in almost every urban area and existing traffic light controllers cannot satisfy the rising demands efficiently to handle the traffic pressure. An intelligent transportation system (ITS) aims to provide major innovations for improving the performance of a public transport system including the traffic light control systems. In this paper, we propose a fog-based distributed architecture for a dynamic traffic light control system for ITS. In the proposed architecture, the local gateway collects real-time local traffic data using a wireless sensor network at each intersection. It also gets the neighboring traffic data from the distributed fog nodes. Using this local and global traffic data, the proposed Efficient Dynamic Traffic Light Control algorithm for Multiple (EDTLCM) intersections calculates the optimal green light sequence and duration (that maximizes the benefits), considering three objectives i) reducing the average waiting time ii) minimizing the fuel consumption and iii) maximizing the throughput. The simulation result shows that the proposed EDTLCM minimizes the waiting time, reduces fuel consumption and improves system throughput compared to the other dynamic strategies.