Cellular automata on FPGA for real-time urban traffic signals control

Among different traffic features, the urban traffic has received a lot of attention due to the ongoing traffic congestion as a result of increased car usage, population growth, and changes in population density. In urban networks, the vehicles flow differs when compared with highways flow because of the freeway's low speed limit but mostly because of the traffic lights control. In this paper, a real-time hardware implemented bio-inspired model for traffic lights control is presented. The proposed model arrives from Cellular Automata (CAs), which have been proven very flexible and powerful computational traffic models, in that they are able to capture all previously mentioned basic phenomena that occur in traffic flows. The resulting CA model was hardware implemented on FPGA to take full advantage of the inherent parallelism of the CAs and to support the function of an advanced electronic system able to provide real-time adaptive control of traffic lights designed to consider traffic conditions for the whole intersections. The analytical results, obtained by application of the aforementioned FPGA CA processor are found in excellent agreement with the numerical simulations.