Development of an intelligent traffic control systems using arduino microcontroller

Abstract

Increasing number of vehicles on the road becomes a concern to road users since it causes massive traffic congestion especially at the junction. It is not only happen in Malaysia, but also around the world. Traffic congestion has contributed to low productivity, pollution and energy losses. In addition, user loss time, environment quality and road safety are also affected by traffic congestions. Most of the existing traffic control system installed in Malaysia is proven not intelligent enough to make smooth traffic flow in minimizing waiting time of vehicles and maximizing number of vehicles flow in the respective lane. In this study, a new design concept of traffic control system is studied. An intelligent traffic control system using Arduino Microcontroller and Infrared proximity (IR) sensor are used together to simulate the traffic flow at three junction road. Program code in Arduino Integrated Development Environmentally (IDE) software was used to communicate with the sensors. These systems use sensor to detect the absence and presence of vehicles and sent the signal to the microcontroller. The decision was made based on the queue length of vehicles at each road. A longer period of green signals will be given to the lane which have long queue of vehicles. WITNESS software was used to simulate and validate the performance of the proposed system. The cycle time is reduced allowing more vehicles flow through the traffic and average waiting time of vehicles for new system also decreased compare to current system. Current traffic light shows average waiting time for vehicle at Traffic 1, Traffic 2 and Traffic 3 is longer which are 10, 7 and 3 seconds compare to the new traffic light system which reducing the average waiting time to 5, 2 and 1 seconds.