Towards a Smart Intersection using Traffic Load Balancing Algorithm

Abstract

Over the past few years vehicle usage has increased exponentially worldwide, but the capacities of transportation systems are still limited, and have not improved in a tantamount way to expeditiously cope with the number of vehicles traveling on them. As a result, road jamming and traffic correlated pollution has increased, and became complicated and chaotic, leading to an adverse effect socially and financially worldwide. Fortunately, Intelligent Transportation Systems are promising technologies that have been introduced to assist in reducing the side effects of these problems. The intelligence of these systems mainly depends on the accuracy and timely reliable application of real time traffic information. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism based on queuing theory aiming at enhancing the load balancing and reducing waiting times on busy road intersections. The simulation results were obtained using the OpNet simulator and have shown that the proposed mechanism can effectively reduce average waiting time and queue lengths up to 44% and thus provide an efficient solution for the load balancing problem.