Characterizing traffic context-based user experience for public safety

Abstract

The modern interconnected digital world is a result of the rapid growth of information and communication technology (ICT.) A smart city aims to provide a single technological platform through integrating all its services, devices, interfaces, and infrastructure, allowing the city to operate in an intelligent way that can support social and benefit from the user experience. In this context, one of the critical issues associated with fast urbanization is traffic management, which needs intelligent infrastructures. In this paper, aiming to enhance public security, improve user experience, and ensure smooth traffic flow, a road traffic signal control mechanism is proposed to automatically control the duration of a green light signal at the signalized road intersections by using an intelligent fuzzy rule-based system (FRBS). This can assist traffic signal plan, which dynamically adjusts the time required for switching between green and red lights. For this purpose, the concept of traffic context based on user experience is proposed to define the context in terms of the number of vehicles, the number of pedestrians, time of day, and the weather conditions as the inputs for the fuzzy control system. The proposed system was designed keeping in view the busy junctions joining important and busy areas; the system is effective for traffic congestion control, energy saving, and enhancing public security and comfort. Also, the FRBS-assisted system is very flexible and not limited to the defined antecedents; consequently, it can be easily extended to accommodate other variables on demand, making it adaptive to any road intersection scenario.