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Traffic congestion in urban areas is a major challenge that leads to real-time problems such as elevated pollution level, greater fuel consumption, higher chances of vehicle collisions and stressed drivers. Therefore, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are needed to improve the efficiency of transportation networks, for smoother and faster travel while reducing strain on existing infrastructure. Smart Traffic Light Systems (TLS) are a critical component of ITS, helping to achieve these objectives. Adaptive Traffic Light Systems (ATLS) employ an approach that dynamically adjusts signal timings based on real-time traffic demand. Compared to traditional TLS with fixed timing schemes, ATLS is capable of meeting the dynamic requirements of ITS. This paper proposes an Adaptive Traffic Light System that predicts traffic volume for the current hour and day using machine learning. It integrates this prediction with a pressure-based method that dynamically controls traffic light phases based on present traffic conditions. A simulation environment was developed using the Simulator of Urban Mobility (SUMO) to evaluate and validate the proposed approach at an isolated intersection with traffic demand and patterns varying by hour and day. To select the most suitable traffic prediction method, a comparative study was conducted among Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors, Decision Tree, Gradient Boosting, and XGBoost algorithms. The proposed system was compared with recent methods with similar objectives across 12 different scenarios. Results showed an average reduction of 26.3% in average waiting time, 22.4% in average time loss, 19.4% in total time loss, 23.8% in average CO emission, and 17.4% in average CO2 emission.

Traffic lights have been installed throughout road networks to control competing traffic flows at road intersections. These traffic lights are primarily intended to enhance vehicle safety while crossing road intersections, by scheduling conflicting traffic flows. However, traffic lights decrease vehicles’ efficiency over road networks. This reduction occurs because vehicles must wait for the green phase of the traffic light to pass through the intersection. The reduction in traffic efficiency becomes more severe in the presence of emergency vehicles. Emergency vehicles always take priority over all other vehicles when proceeding through any signalized road intersection, even during the red phase of the traffic light. Inexperienced or careless drivers may cause an accident if they take inappropriate action during these scenarios. In this paper, we aim to design a dynamic and efficient traffic light scheduling algorithm that adjusts the best green phase time of each traffic flow, based on the real-time traffic distribution around the signalized road intersection. This proposed algorithm has also considered the presence of emergency vehicles, allowing them to pass through the signalized intersection as soon as possible. The phases of each traffic light are set to allow any emergency vehicle approaching the signalized intersection to pass smoothly. Furthermore, scenarios in which multiple emergency vehicles approach the signalized intersection have been investigated to select the most efficient and suitable schedule. Finally, an extensive set of experiments have been utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Reducing CO2 emissions is currently a key policy in most developed countries. In this article, we evaluate whether smart traffic lights can have a relevant role in reducing CO2 emissions in small cities, considering their specific traffic profiles. The research method is a quantitative modelling approach tested by computational simulation. We propose a novel microscopic traffic simulation framework, designed to simulate realistic vehicle kinematics and driver behaviour, and accurately estimate CO2 emissions. We also propose and evaluate a routing algorithm for smart traffic lights, specially designed to optimize CO2 emissions at intersections. The simulations reveal that deploying smart traffic lights at a single intersection can reduce CO2 emissions by 32% to 40% in the vicinity of the intersection, depending on the traffic density. The simulations show other advantages for drivers: an increase in average speed of 60% to 101% and a reduction in waiting time of 53% to 95%. These findings can be useful for city-level decision makers who wish to adopt smart technologies to improve traffic flows and reduce CO2 emissions. This work also demonstrates that the simulator can play an important role as a tool to study the impact of smart traffic lights and foster the improvement in smart routing algorithms to reduce CO2 emissions.

In a field experiment involving online workplace lunch orders, this study examines the impact of numeric and traffic light calorie labels on calorie intake. Employees of a large corporation ordered lunches through a website of the authors' design, on which they were presented menus with numeric calorie labels, traffic light labels, or both together, and the authors compared the calorie content of the ordered lunches with that of diners randomized to receive no calorie information. Each label type reduced lunch calories by approximately 10%. Nutrition knowledge was not improved by any menu format. Traffic light labels achieved meaningful reductions in calories ordered even in the absence of numeric information, and the authors found no apparent benefit or detriment of combining label types. These findings suggest that consumers may benefit most from help in identifying relatively healthier choices but rely little on information about the exact caloric content of items.

Accurate traffic light detection and classification are fundamental for autonomous vehicle (AV) navigation and real-time traffic management in complex urban environments. Existing systems often fall short of reliably identifying and classifying traffic light states in real-time, including their flashing modes. This study introduces FlashLightNet, a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that integrates the nano version of You Only Look Once, version 10m (YOLOv10n) for traffic light detection, Residual Neural Networks 18 (ResNet-18) for feature extraction, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for temporal state classification. The proposed framework is designed to robustly detect and classify traffic light states, including conventional signals (red, green, and yellow) and flashing signals (flash red and flash yellow), under diverse and challenging conditions such as varying lighting, occlusions, and environmental noise. The framework has been trained and evaluated on a comprehensive custom dataset of traffic light scenarios organized into temporal sequences to capture spatiotemporal dynamics. The dataset has been prepared by taking videos of traffic lights at different intersections of Starkville, Mississippi, and Mississippi State University, consisting of red, green, yellow, flash red, and flash yellow. In addition, simulation-based video datasets with different flashing rates—2, 3, and 4 s—for traffic light states at several intersections were created using RoadRunner, further enhancing the diversity and robustness of the dataset. The YOLOv10n model achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 99.2% in traffic light detection, while the ResNet-18 and LSTM combination classified traffic light states (red, green, yellow, flash red, and flash yellow) with an F1-score of 96%.

A traffic light recognition system is a very important building block in an advanced driving assistance system and an autonomous vehicle system. In this paper, we propose a two-staged deep-learning-based traffic light recognition method that consists of a pixel-wise semantic segmentation technique and a novel fully convolutional network. For candidate detection, we employ a binary-semantic segmentation network that is suitable for detecting small objects such as traffic lights. Connected components labeling with an eight-connected neighborhood is applied to obtain bounding boxes of candidate regions, instead of the computationally demanding region proposal and regression processes of conventional methods. A fully convolutional network including a convolution layer with three filters of (1 × 1) at the beginning is designed and implemented for traffic light classification, as traffic lights have only a set number of colors. The simulation results show that the proposed traffic light recognition method outperforms the conventional two-staged object detection method in terms of recognition performance, and remarkably reduces the computational complexity and hardware requirements. This framework can be a useful network design guideline for the detection and recognition of small objects, including traffic lights.

Detecting small objects is a challenging task. We focus on a special case: the detection and classification of traffic signals in street views. We present a novel framework that utilizes a visual attention model to make detection more efficient, without loss of accuracy, and which generalizes. The attention model is designed to generate a small set of candidate regions at a suitable scale so that small targets can be better located and classified. In order to evaluate our method in the context of traffic signal detection, we have built a traffic light benchmark with over 15,000 traffic light instances, based on Tencent street view panoramas. We have tested our method both on the dataset we have built and the Tsinghua–Tencent 100K (TT100K) traffic sign benchmark. Experiments show that our method has superior detection performance and is quicker than the general faster RCNN object detection framework on both datasets. It is competitive with state-of-the-art specialist traffic sign detectors on TT100K, but is an order of magnitude faster. To show generality, we tested it on the LISA dataset without tuning, and obtained an average precision in excess of 90%.

Rapid increase in the private and public vehicles fleet causes urban centers heavily populated with limited transport road infrastructure. To overcome this, in real-time scenarios, queue length-based traffic light controllers are being designed utilizing light-weighted S-Edge devices. This system suffers from starvation problems if a road lane at the intersection continuously receives vehicles during peak hours. With this, higher green phase duration can be allocated to the same-lane multiple times despite vehicles on the other lanes’ longer waiting time. To tackle this problem, an efficient and smart edge computing (S-Edge)-driven traffic light controller is proposed by accounting the real-time heterogeneous vehicular dynamics at the fog computing node. The fog node executes the proposed fuzzy inference system to generate phase-cycle duration. Further, to allocate the phase duration effectively, a method for estimating the lane pressure is proposed for the edge controller utilizing average queue length and waiting time. S-Edge is a light-weighted actuated traffic light controller that generates traffic light control cycle duration and phase (red/yellow/green) duration. To validate the S-Edge controller, a prototype is developed on an Indian city OpenStreetMap utilizing the low-computing power IoT devices, i.e., Raspberry Pi, and a well-known open-source simulator, i.e., Simulation of Urban MObility.

Increased traffic flow causes congestion, especially in large cities. Even though congestion is not unusual, traffic jams still result in very high economic and social losses. Several factors cause congestion, one of which is traffic lights. Therefore, a mechanism is needed so that traffic lights can intelligently and adaptively manage signal time allocation according to traffic flow conditions. A traffic light with this type of mechanism is known as a smart traffic light. Smart traffic light cycle settings can be grouped based on the traffic density, scenarios for emergency vehicles, and the interests of pedestrians. This paper analyzes the methods and technologies used in the development of smart traffic light technology from the perspective of these three situations as well as the development of smart traffic light technology in the future.

As society grows, the urbanized population proliferates, and urbanization accelerates. Increasing traffic problems affect the normal process of the city. The urban transportation system is vital to the effective functioning of any city. Science and technology are critical elements in improving traffic performance in urban areas. In this paper, a novel control strategy based on selecting the type of traffic light and the duration of the green phase to achieve an optimal balance at intersections is proposed. This balance should be adaptable to fixed behavior of time and randomness in a traffic situation; the goal of the proposed method is to reduce traffic volume in transportation, the average delay for each vehicle, and control the crashing of cars. Due to the distribution of urban traffic and the urban transportation network among intelligent methods for traffic control, the multi-factor system has been designed as a suitable, intelligent, emerging, and successful model. Intersection traffic control is checked through proper traffic light timing modeled on multi-factor systems. Its ability to solve complex real-world problems has made multiagent systems a field of distributed artificial intelligence that is rapidly gaining popularity. The proposed method was investigated explicitly at the intersection through an appropriate traffic light timing by sampling a multiagent system. It consists of many intersections, and each of them is considered an independent agent that shares information with each other. The stability of each agent is proved separately. One of the salient features of the proposed method for traffic light scheduling is that there is no limit to the number of intersections and the distance between intersections. In this paper, we proposed method model predictive control for each intersection’s stability; the simulation results show that the predictive model controller in this multi-factor model predictive system is more valuable than scheduling in the fixed-time method. It reduces the length of vehicle queues.