Adaptive Priority Based Scheduling Algorithm For Intelligent Traffic Control in Urban Cities Using Multi Agent System
Adaptive Priority Based Scheduling Algorithm For Intelligent Traffic Control in Urban Cities Using Multi Agent System
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Mamilus Ahaneku
University of Nigeria
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ABSTRACT : Efficient management of traffic flow in agglomerate cities has been a subject of great concern in the
recent time. The continuous variations of vehicular flow and the need to dynamically prioritize emergency service
vehicles (ESVs) contribute greatly to this challenge. Adaptive traffic control systems usually referred to as Intelligent
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Transportation Systems (ITSs) have been adopted in most urban cities to remedy this challenge. These ITSs use-
Traffic Signal Control (TSC) and Dynamic Route Guidance (DRG) to realize congestion control in urban cities.
However the challenge of dynamically prioritizing the flow of ESV in these agglomerated cities has not been efficiently
handled by these systems. This paper proposes a dynamic vehicle prioritized traffic control system, using multi agent
system for urban cities with coordinated flow splits. The proposed algorithm gives preference to like: fire trucks,
ambulances, safety cars and police cars that are required to travel through the traffic network during rush hours. The
prioritized scheduling approach adopted for this system will be modeled as a packet switched network which supports
different traffic type with different quality of service requirement (QoS) literally representing the different ESV flow.
Simulation was carried out using MATLAB 2014 and results obtained were analyzed using Microsoft Excel
2010.Results obtained from the analysis shows that the APS out performance the FITC in the area of average network
delay and intersection utilization by 0.35% and 0.56% respectively. In the area of fairness the APS is not fair to all
class of traffic as it gives more preference to the EVS than NV.
Key Words: ESV, ITS, TSC, DRG, Multi Agent System, VRA
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1. INTRODUCTION
Managing traffic congestion is a crucial challenge in most urban cities. Many of the congestion
experienced in these cities are mostly caused by improper control of traffic lights around the cities. This is
basically brought about by inadequate information of the current traffic condition around the neighboring
road junctions in the cities [1]. The continuous and dynamic variations in vehicle traffic flow in these
cities also contribute greatly to congestion experienced in them. These variations in traffic flow, adds to
the other troubles of traffic control. In view of this, traffic control requires an adaptive system to remedy
this challenge [2]. Unfortunately, the urban vehicle traffic flow is a large scale system and the traffic
control systems deployed in most cities are time dependent. As such many of the approaches adopted in
classical control systems are useless to hire in this dynamic agglomerated cities [3]. Often, in
agglomerated areas vehicles usually wait in queues to cross the intersections or cross roads. This usually
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causes great delay to the flow of emergency service vehicles (ESVs) such as: fire trucks, ambulances,
safety cars and police cars. However in recent times, there have been some amendment to the regular
traffic control system; this is with the aim of accommodating ESVs that requires high priorities while
traveling through the traffic network during rush hours [2, 4]. In most recent traffic control systems, the
presence of these ESVs is usually signaled to traffic controllers that can change the phases order or quite
preempt the intersections thus giving preference to these ESVs in the traffic network [3]. The adaptive
traffic control system currently in use in most urban cities usually referred to as Intelligent Transportation
System (ITS), uses: Traffic Signal Control (TSC) and Dynamic Route Guidance (DRG) in realizing
congestion control [4]. However, the challenge associated with dynamically prioritizing the flow of ESV
during rush hour is not efficiently catered for by this system. Thus in this paper, we propose an adaptive
priority based intelligent traffic control system using multi agent system for urban cities with coordinated
flow splits. The proposed algorithm gives preference to ESVs that are required to travel through the
traffic network during rush hours. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II gives an
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overview of the art in the area of traffic control systems and the different technologies that have been
deployed over time in this area. Section III discusses the multi-agent systems and then, the system
architecture of the proposed dynamic vehicle prioritized traffic management system using multi agent
system. Then we describe the modeled system and carryout analysis of the results obtained from the
simulation. Comparison of the result obtained from the simulation against that of the current application
will be presented in section IV. Finally, Section V concludes and makes recommendations for future
work.
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This is not capable to control the traffic patterns. In [8], green wave system was discussed, which was
used to provide clearance to any emergency vehicle by turning all the red lights to green on the path of the
emergency vehicle, hence providing a complete green wave to the desired vehicle. A ‘green wave’ is the
synchronization of the green phase of traffic signals. With a ‘green wave’ setup, a vehicle passing through
a green signal will continue to receive green signals as it travels down the road. In addition to the green
wave path, the system will track a stolen vehicle when it passes through a traffic light. Advantage of the
system is that GPS inside the vehicle does not require additional power. The biggest disadvantage of
green waves is that, when the wave is disturbed, the disturbance can cause traffic problems that can be
exacerbated by the synchronization. In such cases, the queue of vehicles in a green wave grows in size
until it becomes too large and some of the vehicles cannot reach the green lights in time and must stop.
This is called over- saturation. In [9], the use of RFID traffic control to avoid problems that usually arise
with standard traffic control systems, especially those related to image processing and beam interruption
techniques are discussed. This RFID technique deals with multivehicle, multilane, multi road junction
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areas. It provides an efficient time management scheme, in which, a dynamic time schedule is worked out
in real time for the passage of each traffic column. The real-time operation of the system emulates the
judgment of a traffic policeman on duty. The number of vehicles in each column and the routing are
proprieties, upon which the calculations and the judgments are done. The disadvantage of this work is that
it does not discuss what methods are used for communication between the emergency vehicle and the
traffic signal controller. In [10], it proposed a RFID and GPS based automatic lane clearance system for
ambulance. The focus of this work is to reduce the delay in arrival of the ambulance to the hospital by
automatically clearing the lane, in which, ambulance is travelling, before it reaches the traffic signal. This
can be achieved by turning the traffic signal, in the path of the ambulance, to green when the ambulance
is at a certain distance from the traffic junction. The use of RFID distinguishes between the emergency
and non-emergency cases, thus preventing unnecessary traffic congestion. The communication between
the ambulance and traffic signal post is done through the transceivers and GPS. The system is fully
automated and requires no human intervention at the traffic junctions. The disadvantage of this system is
that it needs all the information about the starting point, end point of the travel. It may not work, if the
ambulance needs to take another route for some reasons or if the starting point is not known in advance.
In [11], currently video traffic surveillance and monitoring systems have been commissioned in many
urban cities. The operation involves a manual analysis of data by the traffic management team to
determine the traffic light duration in each of the junction. It will communicate the same to the local
police officers for the necessary actions. In recent time, some works have adopted the multi-agent
approach. For example, [12] adopted case-based reasoning to control traffic lights. The agent observed
traffic condition at a junction and used this information to match with candidate cases from its case-base;
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consequently it applied the solution of the selected case to control the traffic lights. An Agent proposed in
[13] used some properties of the current states of all traffic patterns as the criterion to determine which
will be the next pattern.
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applications using this technology improves the system's flexibility and capacity to resolve these
unpredicted situations. Multi-agent systems have seen a proliferation in recent years, being used in
applications in various domains. Examples of such domains are: transportation, industry, healthcare,
military etc. The architecture of multi-agent systems varies depending on the application it is used in. In
making such architecture it is important to know where the intelligent agents are placed and the purpose
of each agent. They will have the ability to make their own decisions based on the conditions of the
environment to which they belong. Another important point is the coordination of the agents. Each agent
must be capable to communicate with other agents. Thus the decisions of each agent will be in accordance
with the needs of the entire system. The multi-agent system’s architecture depends on the application in
which it is used. In order to create such architecture, it is important to know the place where the
intelligent agents are in the system, and each agent’s goal. The agents will have the ability to make their
own decisions according to the state of their environment at a given time. The architecture proposed in
this article is that of an agglomerated urban traffic control system. The proposed architecture seeks to
keep the systems entities autonomy (i.e. they have the capacity to make their own decisions) without
necessarily using a central coordinator. In the same time it seeks to increase the system’s flexibility (to
make easier adding or deleting agents) in other to cater for future expansion of modeled urban city. Each
vehicle existing in the monitored area is considered an agent. The agents are mobile because they are
moving on the road and in intersections network. The inherent advantages in this choice of adopting the
mobile agents are: reduced overall network latency, reduced network load, easy of executing
asynchronous and autonomous actions, improved adaptive nature of the system and ease of dynamically
developing new software components in the system [13]. Beside mobile agents in the system architecture
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an agent who will detect the incidents that appeared in the controlled area is introduced. This agent is
called Incident Detection Agent and is doing globally the incident detection. This is necessary because for
every mobile agent (car) to detect the incidents that appear in traffic, a big number of messages
transmitted between the agents is needed. The delays appeared at message transmission will lead to
important detection delays. When a specialized agent is used to detect the incidents, the sent messages
number in the network decreases. However, the disadvantages of using incident detection at the agents
level are: the number of messages sent between agents is growing (this situation can lead to network
overhead), and that the agents don’t have a global image of the system (to have a more complete global
image the agent needs to receive a lot of massages from the other agents) [14]. Without a complete
system image it becomes very hard to detect all the incidents which can influence the agent’s behavior.
The Incident Detection Agent receives information about agents and about the environment. Based on this
information the agent generates the incident information. This information is sent back to the agents.
Each agent plans its own route based on the detected incident information. Planning the new routes is
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necessary only if on its road an incident appears. The new plans have to be generated in a short time, so
that the agent can avoid the blocked area. The part involving changing the agent’s behavior will be done
at each agent level. This will be done locally because the agents have different goals (origin points,
intermediary points and destination points). This data is known at the local level, a big computational
effort being necessary if each route is to be calculated globally and then the resulted routes to be
transmitted to each agent.
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cooperates with Intersection agent to establish the traffic light plan. The various agents of the system
interact and communicate together to achieve their goals. We thus describe the internal architecture of
each agent and protocols of collaborations between the agents in realizing the dynamic vehicle prioritized
traffic control system.
7 6
Arc10 Arc9
Arc 1 Arc2
Arc 3 Arc4
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Figure 1: Crossing system with 8 branches.
Arc 8 Arc5
In Figure 1 above, the number of arcs on each branch depends on the number of lanes. Each lane is
represented by an arc.
• Vehicle Agent (VA): The goal of VA is to minimize the time it takes emergency service vehicles
(ESVs) to navigate the network during rush hour. It ensures that these vehicles have a regular time
interval with its predecessor at each intersection. To achieve these goals, it communicates with the IA in
order to get the right of way at traffic lights and the priority that the given ESV carries at the given time.
In view of this, VA’s are injected into the network by the VRA at a given frequency. When a given VA
enters an arc, it retrieves the necessary information on the length of the current arc, the number of
vehicles on the arc, the capacity of the arc and its flow. Then it calculates a period (i.e. a space time) it
will request to the IA of current information about the next intersection in order to avoid a stop at red light
when the ESV arrives. The time interval requested by the VA is specified by a start time (T begin ) and an
end time (T end ). The start time indicates the moment when the special vehicle will arrive at the traffic
lights and the time required by the green traffic light to evacuate all vehicles which enter the arc before
the ESV.
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vehicle in the route. This priority varies based on the level of emergency attached to the services delivered
by these vehicles.
• Intersection Agent (IA): The IA is the key agent in the proposed system. Each agent is
responsible for monitoring its intersections and generating traffic light plans to regulate traffic. To
achieve its objective, it needs to be assisted by the Stage Agent .They work together to establish an
evacuation plan that maximizes the capacity of the intersection while trying to better satisfy the
reservations of VA. When the IA receives a request from the VA it saves it in its database. And then
carry out a check to decide the manner execution to adopt. In case of two reservations in the database that
may overlap during their execution, the agent delays the reservation with the lowest priority. All bookings
are then sorted and stored; they will be deleted after execution. It’s important to note that reservations can
be executed over several cycles in case of network congestion. The ultimate goal of the IA is to satisfy the
entire requests it get
• Stage Agent (SA): The SA is the agent that manages the various stages of the intersection. Each
agent is responsible for calculating the optimal duration for discharging the intersection, contributing to
the development of plans to control traffic lights to maximize the ability of the crossroads and satisfy SV
reservations. The agent has a process which calculates the green time required after the request of the IA.
The optimal duration of green light is the largest evacuation time of one of the arcs of the stage. It is
calculated by this formula:
T = max {T i } with i=1...m, where m is the number of arcs entering in this stage and T i the necessary time
to evacuate every arc
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Ti = +( * ) (3)[13]
N i is the number of cars in the arc, D i the flow, L i the length and V i speed of the vehicles.
Stage index urgency determines the importance of the stage and lets the IA computes an order for the
stages in the establishment of the traffic light plan; the longer the lapse of time, the more urgent the stage.
The urgency index is measured by the following formula:
Ij = (4) [13]
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Figure 2: System flow chart of operation
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The results obtained from the simulation model are analyzed as thus:
5.1. Overall Network delay against Number of vehicle for APS and FITC: The result from the
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simulation as presented in figure 3, shows that the when the network deploys the proposed Adaptive
Priority Based Scheduling Algorithm (APS) for traffic control, vehicles in the network experiences
reduced delays as against the situation where the Fixed Intelligent Traffic Control (FITC) was deployed
for traffic control in the network. This can basically be attributed to the fact that the APS uses agents in
coordinating the traffic flow and each agent can take logical decision in the network thus reducing the
delay experience by vehicles in the network. It is also observed that emergency service vehicles
experience least delay relative to normal vehicle transversing the network. This is attributable to the facts
that the agent in the network gives more preference to ESVs and such they can at any time these vehicles
appear in the network interrupt the traffic signal just to give way to these ESVs. By so doing, this ESVs
experience very little delay in the network.
Figure 3: Overall Network delay against Number of vehicle for APS and FITC
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5.2. Average Intersection Utilization against Number of vehicle for APS and FITC: From the
simulation result as shown in figure 4, it is seen that the APS ensures better utilization of the intersections
at every point in time. This is because the agents in the network, work together in ensuring that
information about the condition of each intersection are transmitted to every IA, thus enabling them take
coordinated decisions on the traffic plan at each intersection.
5.3.
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Figure 4: Average Intersection Utilization against Number of vehicle for APS and FITC
Fairness of Adaptive priority based scheduling scheme to ESV and NV: It is seen from the
plot in figure 5, that the developed APS is not totally fair in it distribution of road traffic resources. It
gives more preference to ESV than NV as it does not take into cognizance the degree of occurrence of
ESVs at an intersection. The resultant effect is that some vehicles (NVs) tend to spend more time at
intersection.
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6. CONCLUSION
The development of an intelligent traffic model that is fair in the provisioning of road traffic resource in
urban cities has been a great challenge. In this work we propose an Adaptive Priority Based Scheduling
Algorithm for Intelligent Traffic Control (APS). The proposed APS ensures that road traffic resource is
dynamically distributed to different road users/vehicles based on the priority allotted to the type of
vehicle. It is seen that even though the APS out performs the conventional FITC used in urban cities in
the area of delay and utilization, it is not totally fair in it distribution of road traffic resources. It is seen
that some vehicles will starve in the distribution of resources as IA does not take into cognizance the
occurrence of ESVs in an intersection. The resultant effect is that some vehicles (NVs) tend to spend
more time at intersection.
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[4] N. Bhouri, S. Haciane, F. Balbo, “A Multi-Agent System to Regulate Urban Traffic: Private Vehicles
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VITAE
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Ajibo Augustine Chinenye is a Ph.D student of the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of
Nigeria Nsukka, Enugu State, Nigeria where he is specializing in Communication Engineering. His
current research interests include: NGNs, Network Integration techniques in IoT supported network
environment, resource provisioning for LTE and LTE Advanced network. He is also an academic staff of
the Department of Electronic Engineering of the aforementioned institution.
Igboeli Chukwudi is a staff of Ministry of Foreign Affairs Abuja Nigeria. His hold a Masters degree in
“Telecommunication Engineering”, from the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Nigeria
Nsukka. His current research interests are in resource allocation and handover in LTE.
Ahaneku, Mamilus Aginwa is a senior lecturer of Communications Engineering. His research interest
includes FM threshold and methods of limiting its effects on performance, Equipment grafting in
telecommunications industry, power capacity of transmission lines, GSM base stations radiations level.
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