Adaptive Traffic Light Control using VANET: A case study

Abstract

Rapid urbanization has put increasingly pressure on traffic management in urban areas. Conventional traffic signal with fixed or pre-defined variable cycles setting can slightly alleviate the increasing traffic problem, but cannot deal with continuously growing vehicular traffic in rapidly growing urban areas. VANET technology offers a promising solution for better vehicular traffic management in urban area to reduce traffic jam and improve transportation safety. Adaptive Traffic Light Control (ATLC) using VANET has attracted considerable attention from academic community. Unfortunately, most of these existing works used simulated traffic flow and hypothetical intersection architectures which may not reflect the reality of urban area. In this paper, we present a case study based on a specific intersection in the city of Moncton with real traffic data, and propose a new adaptive traffic light control algorithm. Our results show a substantial improvement of traffic throughput and average waiting time in comparison with fixed optimal cycle's time currently used by the city of Moncton and with existing adaptive solutions.