A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON ROAD TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

P.M. Xavier, Raju Nedunchezhian

Abstract: With the rapid stress in infrastructure development by all nations across the world, better designed, engineered and constructed roads and highways have come up or are in different stages of implementation in rural and urban areas. With the improvement in automobile technology, lighter and high-speed vehicles are a common sight along the highways. The highway environment consists of fast and slow moving vehicles, traffic congestions particularly at traffic nodal points, collisions, accidents, bottlenecks, and all leading to unpredictability in traffic flow causing considerable loss of time, upsetting schedules, economic loss and environmental pollution. With the enhanced economic development, more and more automobiles will be on the road without commensurate improvement in road space. Having dynamic information on traffic density along highways and lateral roads will help in streamlining traffic flow. The state of road density is an important factor in evaluating travel times and travelling routes. A number of studies have been carried out on traffic management by mathematicians, engineers and town planners with varied outcomes. The studies are generally based on the volume, speed and density of vehicles on a given segment of road space using conventional traffic detection devices such as Inductive loops, magnetic loops, cameras, radars and modern Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications such as RF-Id, Wireless Sensors, VANETs and so on, each with its own limitations due to variations in prediction accuracy, environmental factors, data collection difficulties and cost. With the ubiquitous presence of mobile signals, it is now possible to monitor vehicular traffic flow along highways and lateral roads with a high degree of accuracy with minimum cost. This paper is a comparative study of existing systems for vehicular traffic management and to suggest the use of mobile signals for vehicular traffic management.

Keywords: Traffic flow, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Vehicular traffic management

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0327021