Design and Implementation of Density-Based Traffic Management System

Traffic congestion and accidents caused by over speeding vehicles have been a major cause for concern in societies due to their negative effects such as stress to commuters, release of more toxic fumes into the atmosphere, accidents and loss of productive hours. The conventional traffic light uses a fixed logic of allocating the same “go time” to lanes at intersections without taking the density of traffic into consideration. This paper offers an approach for handling traffic congestion and over speeding offenders. This system uses infrared sensors as counters to measure the traffic density in each lane. The infrared sensors are also for speed detection with a bluetooth module and bluetooth serial monitor. These sensors are interfaced with the traffic light through a microcontroller. The microcontroller which was used to implement this is the Arduino Mega with the Atmega 2560 chip. The system was developed to alleviate traffic congestion and over-speeding offenders using a case study of an intersection in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria which usually has severe traffic congestion. This intersection consists of Abak Road, Udo Obio and Udo Eduok Streets. This system was tested and all objectives were accomplished. Results obtained from the implementation of the prototype design show that traffic control and speed detection using infrared sensors and Arduino Atmega 2560 give a better performance and the time taken to clear traffic at an intersection reduced significantly with 60% time saved