Intelligent traffic lights control system

Abstract

The objective of this report is to give a comprehensive summary of the Intelligent Traffic Lights Control System that has been developed to automate the traffic control process according to the amount of traffic on each incoming road and destination lane at a junction. The current mode of operation of traffic lights in Uganda is based on a globally defined allocation of time but this ignores scenarios where some roads may have more incoming traffic compared to other roads and also the fact that some destination lanes may still be heavily congested thus making it pointless to release cars heading in those particular directions. The Intelligent Traffic Lights Control System is an improvement to the current mode of operation of the traffic lights aimed at easing the work of traffic police officers during rush hours of traffic. It does this by checking the amount of incoming traffic on the different incoming roads, compares them and then decides how long to release each lane in that road taking into account the amount of traffic in that lane and how free the corresponding destination lane is. If the sensors for that particular lane are blocked, another lane is checked and if the ones for that particular lane are not blocked, traffic is released to it. There is a maximum time for which traffic is released and priority of unreleased lanes is increased from time to time to prevent starvation. The whole cycle is repeated to avoid situations where a road with fewer cars is completely ignored. This report explains the design of the Intelligent Traffic Lights Control System to meet specifications. The system consists mainly five major components namely; the Camera, microprocessor, Infrared Sensors, GSM Module and the traffic lights. The Intelligent Traffic Lights Control System that was implemented is a combination of hardware and embedded software. Arduino IDE and MATLAB were used for the software algorithms and processing while the hardware prototype was implemented using the components mentioned above.