Intelligent Traffic Light Control Research Articles

Intelligent Traffic Light Control System

Abstract: The "Intelligent traffic light control system " project introduces an innovative approach to traffic management, aiming to expedite emergency vehicle passage. Utilizing Zigbee and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, this system assigns a unique RFID tag to each vehicle, enabling precise tracking and control at traffic junctions. The scenarios involving emergency vehicle clearance, the system's responsiveness shines. When an emergency vehicle clearance approaches, the system rapidly receives the signal from zigbee transmitter associated with it and promptly triggers a green signal at the traffic junction. This prioritization ensures that emergency vehicles can navigate the traffic with minimal delays, potentially saving lives. Another remarkable feature of the system is stolen vehicle detection capability. In the event that a vehicle with a specific RFID tag is reported as stolen, the system is programmed to take action. It sends immediate SMS notifications to relevant authorities, such as law enforcement or the vehicle owner. This proactive response enhances the chances of recovering stolen vehicles and contributes to overall security. The hardware components of this system include Arduino Uno. Arduino Uno serves as the central control unit, processing RFID data and executing signal adjustments, while the GSM module facilitates real-time communication, enabling SMS alerts and notifications. The " Intelligent traffic light control system " project exemplifies how RFID technology and zigbee technology can revolutionize traffic management. By incorporating data analysis and automation, this system offers a multifaceted solution to common traffic-related challenges.

A Fuzzy Based Intelligent Traffic Light Control (ITLC) Method: An Implementation in Ankara City

The escalating global population and increased vehicle usage have worsened traffic congestion in metropolitan areas, a significant urban challenge. Addressing this, adaptive traffic light control methods, especially at intersections, are being developed to improve traffic flow and reduce waiting times. This study significantly contributes to this field by implementing Fuzzy Logic in intelligent traffic light systems, focusing on Ankara's Polatlı Refik Cesur intersection. Using the SUMO simulation platform and Python programming, it analyzed waiting times and queue lengths. The initial phase used queue length for each intersection arm as an input. Fuzzy logic rules then determined the output, prioritizing street or phase order for optimal flow. The study further proposed an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS)-based control plan. ANFIS merges neural network capabilities with fuzzy logic, using waiting time and queue length as inputs to regulate the green light duration. Compared to existing traffic systems, this model showed a substantial improvement. It achieved a 36.5% reduction in waiting times, underlining the efficiency of the Fuzzy Logic-based method. This approach not only enhances traffic management but also contributes significantly to the literature on intelligent traffic light control systems. By addressing key urban traffic issues, the study paves the way for future advancements in traffic management technologies. The findings highlight the potential of combining advanced computational methods, like ANFIS, with traditional traffic control techniques to optimize urban traffic flow, offering a blueprint for similar challenges in other metropolitan areas.

Multi-Agent Attention Double Actor-Critic Framework for Intelligent Traffic Light Control in Urban Scenarios With Hybrid Traffic

In real-world urban environments, hybrid and disorder traffic brings new challenges for the intelligent traffic light control system (ITLCS). Apart from coordinating traffic flows around intersections, the ITLCS is responsive to ensuring high priority vehicles pass through intersections quickly. To this end, we formulate the multiple intersections' decision-making problem as a Semi-Markov game and propose a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">multi-agent attention double actor-critic (MAADAC)</i> framework to solve this game, integrating the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">options framework</i> with <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">graph attention networks (GATs)</i> . Specifically, the options framework empowers agents to learn to make a long sequence of satisfactory decisions, such as keeping a reasonable phase for a short period to ensure high priority vehicles pass through intersections quickly. Besides, we adopt GATs to capture graph-structure mutual influences among agents. We set up a simulator based on real-world city road networks and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of MAADAC. The experimental results show that MAADAC can reduce high priority vehicles' waiting time in the interval of 18.16%-38.14% versus the density of vehicles in real-world urban scenarios over several state-of-the-art approaches. Also, our framework can guarantee the passing efficiency of high priority vehicles under various traffic conditions with the change in the proportion of high priority vehicles.

DERLight: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Traffic Light Control Algorithm with Dual Experience Replay

&lt;p&gt;In recent years, with the increasingly severe traffic environment, most cities are facing various traffic congestion problems, and the demand for intelligent regulation of traffic signals is also increasing. In this study, we propose a new intelligent traffic light control algorithm, dual experience replay light (DERLight), which innovatively and efficiently designs a dual experience replay training mechanism based on the classic deep Q network (DQN) framework and considers the dynamic epoch function. As results show that compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms, DERLight can shorten the average travel time of vehicles, increase the throughput at intersections, and also speed up the convergence of the network. In addition, the design of this algorithm framework is not only limited to the field of intelligent transportation, but also has transferability for some other fields.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;

AI-based YOLO V4 Intelligent Traffic Light Control System

With the growing number of city vehicles, traffic management is becoming one of the most persistent challenges. Traffic bottlenecks cause more significant disturbances in our everyday lives and raise stress levels, negatively impacting the environment by increasing carbon emissions. Due to the population increase, megacities are experiencing severe challenges and significant delays in their day-to-day activities related to transportation. An intelligent traffic management system is required to assess traffic density regularly and take appropriate action. Even though separate lanes are available for various vehicle types, the effective result of wait times for the Commuters at the traffic signal point is not reduced. The proposed methodology employs Artificial Intelligence to collect live images from signals to address this issue in the current system. This approach calculates traffic density, utilizing the image processing technique YOLOv4 for effective traffic congestion management. The YOLOv4 algorithm produces better accuracy in the detection of multiple vehicles. Intelligent monitoring technology uses a signal-switching algorithm at signal intersections to coordinate time distribution and alleviate traffic congestion, resulting in lower vehicle waiting times.

A traffic light control method based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm

Intelligent traffic light control (ITLC) algorithms are very efficient for relieving traffic congestion. Recently, many decentralized multi-agent traffic light control algorithms are proposed. These researches mainly focus on improving reinforcement learning method and coordination method. But, as all the agents need to communicate while coordinating with each other, the communication details should be improved as well. To guarantee communication effectiveness, two aspect should be considered. Firstly, a traffic condition description method need to be designed. By using this method, traffic condition can be described simply and clearly. Secondly, synchronization should be considered. As different intersections have different cycle lengths and message sending event happens at the end of each traffic signal cycle, every agent will receive messages of other agents at different time. So it is hard for an agent to decide which message is the latest one and the most valuable. Apart from communication details, reinforcement learning algorithm used for traffic signal timing should also be improved. In the traditional reinforcement learning based ITLC algorithms, either queue length of congested cars or waiting time of these cars is considered while calculating reward value. But, both of them are very important. So a new reward calculation method is needed. To solve all these problems, in this paper, a new ITLC algorithm is proposed. To improve communication efficiency, this algorithm adopts a new message sending and processing method. Besides, to measure traffic congestion in a more reasonable way, a new reward calculation method is proposed and used. This method takes both waiting time and queue length into consideration.

Auto-learning communication reinforcement learning for multi-intersection traffic light control

Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a promising solution to achieve intelligent traffic light control by regarding each intersection as an independent agent. However, agents encounter partial observability and environmental instability issues when learning optimal strategies. To mitigate the impacts caused by the partial observability of cooperative agents, we propose the auto-learning communication reinforcement learning (ALCORL) method based on the advantage actor–critic algorithm. ALCORL enables intersections to communicate and enhance cooperation by receiving messages from adjacent intersections in multi-intersection scenarios. Specifically, the autoencoder is introduced into ALCORL to dynamically learn communication messages instead of defining specific communication regulations. Different from most studies that control the sequential conversion of phases to improve traffic conditions, we focus on regulating the phase duration directly and scheduling the traffic light time more flexibly. We conduct extensive experiments on different-scale datasets and ever-changing traffic conditions to verify the validity of ALCORL. The experimental results show that ALCORL performs better than several state-of-the-art algorithms in all evaluation metrics.

IMPROVED TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEM THROUGH DETECTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF VEHICLES USING CAMERA BASED CROWD SENSING WITH DEEP LEARNING APPROACH.

Abstract - Intelligent traffic light control system can be considered as one of the main aspects of a smart city. There is significant increase in the number of People that own vehicles and this leads to traffic congestion in urban cities of developing countries. Traffic congestion is one of the highly challenging problems people face in their daily lives which affect their working productivity, causes accident, unnecessary delays and possibly loss of lives. The control of traffics based on the densities and classes of the vehicles using deep learning approach proved to be a better approach in handling traffic jams according to the current state of the studies. However, the current state of the studies did not have special consideration for the class of special vehicles (VIPs) which need special consideration due to their importance and tight schedules. Also, it did not consider allocating time based on the classification. Thus, a model to improve the detection and classification of vehicles on side of intersection as well as special consideration for VIPs was proposed. The proposed model was built using Faster R-CNN based on Tensorflow machine learning framework on a Google Colab environment. The model was able to detect and classify vehicles as “special vehicles (i.e. VIP), Emergency (EV) and Others” classes of vehicles, a time allocation simulator was proposed based on the specified classes with special timing for VIPs. Results show that using the proposed method, 94.43% accuracy was achieved.

Multi-agent broad reinforcement learning for intelligent traffic light control

Intelligent traffic light control (ITLC) aims to relieve traffic congestion. Some multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) algorithms have been proposed for ITLC, and most of them use deep neural networks to make decisions. However, the abundant parameters of deep structure lead to the time-consuming training process of MADRL. Recently, a broad reinforcement learning (BRL) approach has been proposed to improve the efficiency of training for an agent. Unlike MADRL algorithms that use deep architecture, BRL utilizes a broad architecture. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent broad reinforcement learning (MABRL) algorithm for ITLC. The MABRL algorithm adopts the broad network to process the joint information and updates the parameters using ridge regression. To increase the effectiveness of interaction among agents, we design a dynamic interaction mechanism (DIM) based on the attention mechanism. The DIM enables agents to aggregate information on particular intersections at appropriate moments. We conduct experiments on three different datasets. The results demonstrate that the effectiveness of MABRL outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms in alleviating traffic congestion with shorter training time.

DeResolver: A Decentralized Conflict Resolution Framework with Autonomous Negotiation for Smart City Services

As various smart services are increasingly deployed in modern cities, many unexpected conflicts arise due to various physical world couplings. Existing solutions for conflict resolution often rely on centralized control to enforce predetermined and fixed priorities of different services, which is challenging due to the inconsistent and private objectives of the services. Also, the centralized solutions miss opportunities to more effectively resolve conflicts according to their spatiotemporal locality of the conflicts. To address this issue, we design a decentralized negotiation and conflict resolution framework named DeResolver, which allows services to resolve conflicts by communicating and negotiating with each other to reach a Pareto-optimal agreement autonomously and efficiently. Our design features a two-step self-supervised learning-based algorithm to predict acceptable proposals and their rankings of each opponent through the negotiation. Our design is evaluated with a smart city case study of three services: intelligent traffic light control, pedestrian service, and environmental control. In this case study, a data-driven evaluation is conducted using a large dataset consisting of the GPS locations of 246 surveillance cameras and an automatic traffic monitoring system with more than 3 million records per day to extract real-world vehicle routes. The evaluation results show that our solution achieves much more balanced results, i.e., only increasing the average waiting time of vehicles, the measurement metric of intelligent traffic light control service, by 6.8% while reducing the weighted sum of air pollutant emission, measured for environment control service, by 12.1%, and the pedestrian waiting time, the measurement metric of pedestrian service, by 33.1%, compared to priority-based solution.

Evolutionary reinforcement learning multi-agents system for intelligent traffic light control: new approach and case of study

&lt;span&gt;Due to the rapid growth of urban vehicles, traffic congestion has become more serious. The signalized intersections are used all over the world and still established in the new construction. This paper proposes a self-adapted approach, called evolutionary reinforcement learning multi-agents system (ERL-MA), which combines computational intelligence and machine learning. The concept of this work is to build an intelligent agent capable of developing senior skills to manage the traffic light control system at any type of junction, using two powerful tools: learning from the confronted experience and the assumption using the randomization concept. The ERL-MA is an independent multi-agents system composed of two layers: the modeling and the decision layers. The modeling layer uses the intersection modeling using generalized fuzzy graph technique. The decision layer uses two methods: the novel greedy genetic algorithm (NGGA), and the Q-learning. In the Q-learning method, a multi Q-tables strategy and a new reward formula are proposed. The experiments used in this work relied on a real case of study with a simulation of one-hour scenario at Pasubio area in Italy. The obtained results show that the ERL-MA system succeeds to achieve competitive results comparing to urban traffic optimization by integrated automation (UTOPIA) system using different metrics.&lt;/span&gt;

Traffic Congestion Monitoring Using Smart Traffic Control Approach for Emergency Vehicle

Abstract: The efficiency and robustness increased after using embedded technology for monitoring and control applications. Due to traffic load, intensity can get stuck or they are delayed in reaching their destination. The system describes an intelligent and complex application that helps to clear traffic and to improve security while having fast response of the emergency services. By making use of embedded and wireless communication we can develop an application to clear the traffic while coming in the path. There is a system called as “Intelligent traffic light controller”. Where traffic light intelligently decides based on the total traffic on all adjacent roads. This paper presents the current framework of decision support systems for traffic management based on short and medium term predictions and includes some reflections on their likely evolution, based on current scientific research and the evolution of the availability of new types of data and their associated methodologies. When unexpected and unplanned events such as natural disasters, traffic accidents or even terrorist attacks happen, it is necessary to prepare a quick evacuation process and the provisioning of the quickest access routes for emergency services units.

Intelligent Traffic Light Control System with Priority Lane Intervention

The current traffic light system uses a lot of fixed time signals. Fixed time signals cause traffic jams in one or several lanes due to traffic congestion. On the other hand, emergency vehicles cannot get their rights to the maximum due to the density of these vehicles. This study aims to build an intelligent traffic light with a vehicle density sensor device and a smartphone application to increase the accuracy of light timing and parse traffic density. Furthermore, in an emergency, they can still overcome and accelerate the speed of passing vehicles by manually intervening with the traffic light through a smartphone application connected wirelessly to the traffic light. The intelligent traffic light is made with Arduino Bluetooth Control (ABC), Bluetooth HC-05, Arduino Mega 2560, and infrared (IR) sensor E18-D80NK. The results show that the green light setting is based on the input from the IR sensor both near sensor (NS) and far sensor (FS) work well. When NS detects a vehicle with a green light, it increases Y seconds from the default X seconds. If FS detects a vehicle with a green light, it increases by Z seconds. Settings with the ABC application can randomly turn on the green light in four lanes according to the will of the smartphone operator.

Intelligent Traffic Light Control by Exploring Strategies in an Optimised Space of Deep Q-Learning

Intelligent traffic light control is one of the modern approaches to solve traffic congestion, where reinforcement learning is a widely used method. Conventionally, reinforcement learning is used to determine whether to change the current phase (or choose a traffic phase) after each small interval. One major drawback of these approaches is that it makes the current traffic light phase duration uncertain before the current phase terminates. Directly determining the duration of the traffic light phase can effectively avoid this shortcoming. An adaptive traffic light timing system is proposed in this paper which can directly control the phase duration. In the proposed system, the Q-learning algorithm is employed and the action space is defined as all possible phase durations. In addition, the reward function is redefined to guide the agent to balance more traffic metrics, and the state is redefined to reduce the state space. Finally, the proposed system is evaluated by equal, unequal, and complex traffic scenarios. Results show that the proposed system has a better performance compared with other methods in controlling traffic lights, even on complex traffic scenarios.

STMARL: A Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach for Cooperative Traffic Light Control

The development of intelligent traffic light control systems is essential for smart transportation management. While some efforts have been made to optimize the use of individual traffic lights in an isolated way, related studies have largely ignored the fact that the use of multi-intersection traffic lights is spatially influenced, as well as the temporal dependency of historical traffic status for current traffic light control. To that end, in this article, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (STMARL) framework for effectively capturing the spatio-temporal dependency of multiple related traffic lights and control these traffic lights in a coordinating way. Specifically, we first construct the traffic light adjacency graph based on the spatial structure among traffic lights. Then, historical traffic records will be integrated with current traffic status via Recurrent Neural Network structure. Moreover, based on the temporally-dependent traffic information, we design a Graph Neural Network based model to represent relationships among multiple traffic lights, and the decision for each traffic light will be made in a distributed way by the deep Q-learning method. Finally, the experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data have demonstrated the effectiveness of our STMARL framework, which also provides an insightful understanding of the influence mechanism among multi-intersection traffic lights.

Integrated tripartite modules for intelligent traffic light system

&lt;span&gt;The traffic in urban areas is primarily controlled by traffic lights, contributing to the excessive, if not properly installed, long waiting times for vehicles. The condition is compounded by the increasing number of road accidents involving pedestrians in cities across the world. Thus, this work presents an integrated tripartite module for an intelligent traffic light system. This system has enough ingredients for success that can solve the above challenges. The proposed system has three modules: the intelligent visual monitoring module, intelligent traffic light control module, and the intelligent recommendation module for emergency vehicles. The monitor module is a visual module capable of identifying the conditions of traffic in the streets. The intelligent traffic light control module configures many intersections in a city to improve the flow of vehicles. Finally, the intelligent recommendation module for emergency vehicles offers an optimal path for emergency vehicles. The evaluation of the proposed system has been carried out in Al-Sader city/Bagdad/Iraq. The intelligent recommendation module for the emergency vehicles module shows that the optimization rate average for the optimal path was in range 67.13% to 92%, where the intelligent traffic light control module shows that the optimization ratio was in range 86% to 91.8%.&lt;/span&gt;

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Traffic Light Scheduling Framework for SDN-Enabled Smart Transportation System

This work proposes a traffic-light scheduling framework using the deep reinforcement learning technique to balance the traffic flow and to prevent congestion in the dense regions of the city via a software-defined control interface. A software-defined control enabled architecture is proposed to monitor the traffic conditions and it generates the traffic light control signal (Red/Yellow/Green) accordingly. For an intelligent traffic light control signal, a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model is proposed which takes vehicular dynamics as inputs from the real-time traffic environment such as heterogeneous vehicles count, speed, traffic density etc. To determine the congestion, a threshold policy is proposed and deployed on control server which generates the congestion prevention signal. A DRL agent operates in the coordination of congestion prevention signal and generates an effective traffic light control signal. The proposed model is evaluated through a realistic simulation on Indian city OpenStreetMap by using a well-known open-source simulator (SUMO). The comparative results show that the proposed solution improves several performance metrics such as average waiting time, throughput, average queue length, and average speed in the interval of 28.34% – 66.62%, 24.76% – 66.60%, 30.89% – 69.80%, and 16.62% – 43.67% respectively over other states of the art approaches.

Simulation and Research of Urban Intelligent Traffic Light Control System

Intelligent traffic light control system belongs to the field of transportation public safety control. So far, the traffic light control system on the market cannot change the working time of the traffic lights according to the actual traffic flow, which is not conducive to the easing of the traffic flow and easy to cause traffic jams. Therefore, it is necessary to solve the problem of the existing traffic light control system which cannot adjust the working hours of the traffic light according to the actual road conditions, so as to alleviate the traffic jam at the intersection to a certain extent. In this paper, the design of intelligent traffic light control system uses AT89C51 MCU as the core device. The system controls the traffic of different times and different conditions, and it can alleviate traffic jam to a certain extent. This paper analyzes the hardware and software designes of intelligent traffic light control system, and simulates traffic light control by simulation software. The system of this paper is simple in structure, economical and practical, reliable in operation and it can effectively dredge the traffic.

Smart Traffic Assistance System for Ambulance Vehicles using Internet of Things

The traffic lights also referred to as traffic signals are used to provide assistance in controlling city traffics and streamlining the present traffic situations. The traffic lights are used since 1868. They are employed by traffic sergeant to avoid congestion and to concern about the right flow of traffic in cities. As years passed, these lights are evolved with automatic controls, pedestrian supporters and so on. There are several standards followed in implementation and design. The intelligent traffic light controller is designed to develop a traffic signal based on avoidance of traffic congestion and also innovative control to clear the traffic for emergency vehicle. The ambulance would have a transmitter within it, which would transmit a signal to the receiver side, this will enable green signal in the corresponding pole. The light of the signal is controlled by automatic timers which are built in by discrete components. Arduino boards are used to control the automatic timers. This module helps to save the lives of many people as well as to avoid congestion.

Design of Lighting Intelligent Control System Based on OpenCV Image Processing Technology

The high growth of vehicular travel in urban areas, in particular, requires a traffic control system that optimizes traffic flow efficiency. Traffic congestion can also occur by large de-lays in Red Light etc. The delay in lighting is difficult to code and does not rely on real traffic density. It follows that traffic controls are simulated and configured to better meet this rising demand. So, in order to avoid the traffic control problem, the Adaptive Intelligent Traffic Light control system (AITLCS) has been proposed based on OpenCV and Image processing technique. The system proposed is designed to ensure smooth and efficient traffic flow for daily life as well as emergency and public transportation safety. Based on the road density instead of the levels set the proposed system provides the timing for the traffic light signal so that a highly loaded side switched on over long periods compared with the other lanes. It can also be used at an intersection with traffic signs, which controls the traffic light signal at the intersection. If timers are smart to predict the exact time, the system is more efficient because it reduces the time spent on unintended green signal significantly. With the help of OpenCV software, this paper aims to have a signal management SMART solution that will be cost-effective at the end. The system consists of a camera facing a lane taking pictures of the route we want to travel and then the density of the pedestrian and vehicle is taken and compared with each image employing image processing. Such images are processed effectively to learn the density of traffic.