INTRODUCTION:
Delhi waste INR 600 Billion a year by standing (idle) in traffic. It is expected that it could cost around INR 90,000 Billion by 2030 unless steps are taken to manage it.
One of the crucial parameters on which traffic depends upon is the traffic light system. The traffic flow depends on the time of the day- normally it peaks during the office hours, moderate during the afternoon and late at night traffic is minimum.
But in the current traffic light system, the lights transition time slots are fixed and do not depend on real-time traffic flow. The smooth passage of the emergency vehicle like an ambulance during traffic is a crucial issue.
So as part of my master’s project, I choose to develop a “Smart Traffic Light Control System”.
OBJECTIVE:
The aim of the project was to tackle the problem with the fixed time traffic light control system and automate the lights during a medical emergency for the ambulance.
The system consists of a PIC microcontroller which was used to interface with all the IR sensors (that checks the traffic density), RF sensors (for ambulance data transmission), and other components.
IR sensors are fixed on both sides of the road. When any car interrupts the IR diode sensor then the photodiode senses the interruption and gives a signal to the controller, which changes the counter time. If no traffic is there on the road then Greenlight timing is reduced to 50 per cent. When traffic is normal then the counter shows a normal light timing. When traffic is dense then the counter shows a double-timing. Hence, we use adaptive logic in this project to increase the Red/Green light time as per sensor interruption.
For the ambulance, the ambulance is associated with the RF transmitter along with the encoder. The receiver along with a decoder is placed with the microcontroller. When the emergency switch is pressed then the transmitter sends an emergency code in the form of 4-bit data from encoder IC. The receiver receives this data in the form of 4 bit and compares inside the controller for emergency interrupt. As the interrupt is there on, receiver traffic light changes its position from Red to Green for some time and again converted to the Red after some time.