In case any (preferrably Indian) organisation/person is interested in working on any of these and wants to discuss related technical and non-technical issues with me, please mail me mentioning the concerned idea in mail subject.

1. Automated/Improved traffic control/streamlining

How often you have got stuck in traffic jam and wished if you could know about it at one of the previous signals, where you could take an alternate route?

One of the ideas behind automated traffic control is to collect information about traffic patterns and density at various signals and feed that to neighbouring signals at same and neighbouring junctions so as to dynamically adjust the signal timings to smoothen out the traffic flow. For example, even at 10:00am on two different days the signal timings could be different at same signal depending upon the traffic load.

Few issues involved in ATC (automated traffic control) are -

1. Determining traffic rate/density as accurately for the process. Before one does this, one would need to characterise what is indicated and intended by these terms. Few ideas for detecting traffic load/ determining traffic density go like -
   • Have an equispaced array of sensors for some fixed length dependent upon observed traffic at that point in past.
     Originally I had thought of keeping the sensors on the sides of road but I found it bit flawed and easily cheatable. In march 2005, I shared the idea with one of my teachers, who pointed out that sensors could better be placed under the road.
   • Using image processing : take a snapshot of some fixed length of road when it is empty or colored some way and remains so. Pictures of same cross-section of road are taken at regular or dynamically adjusting non-uniform intervals and a comparison is done against the empty road snapshot, to find traffic density.
     This approach requires good computing power and processing model that can take decisions and communicate those to neighbours in 1-2 seconds at max, better in less than 1 second. Cost/maintenance wise it could be better than previous option.
     Even this idea I found bit flawed and unsatisfactory.
2. Collecting related data from various signals, sharing it with relevant neighbours and analysing it in time to smoothen out the traffic flow. It will be useful to exchange data about not only forward but backward (i.e. in both directions on a road) traffic flow to control signal timings. Timings at a signal is not only the function of incoming traffic, but outgoing as well. The state of traffic at forward direction signal also needs to be considered in controlling the flow/adjusting the timings at any signal.
3. How many and which of the neighbours to consider ? What medium to use for interconnecting the devices at different signals ? Whether to connect them in point-to-point or broadcast configuration ?
   
   Wireless has got not only interference and possiblity of some mischievious person messing up with the system, kind of issues, but also complicates logic to identify data only from relevant signals, to be able to take appropriate decisions.
   
   Optical fibre might be better option over the years for variety of reasons. Time to time digging by municipal/civic departments is a matter of concern though.
   
   High bandwidth availability also opens avenues for lot of other information exchanges like information from/to traffic cops, tracking down faulting vehicles/drivers, having information on traffic at various junctions in a zone in a city or entire city available at some central point etc. Details some other time.
4. What kind of hardware to be used at every signal ? Would CMP/SOC based hardwares be suitable candidates for the processing requirements and financially as well ? If units are deployed in large nos. i.e. if automated traffic control is accepted by various city corporations and/or state/central governments, large scale production would bring the cost down. Irrespective of that, one needs to go into fine details of what components would comprise final hardware and in what way those will be laid out.
5. What kind of OS/executive to be used on these hardwares - customize one of the existing opensource Real Time or Embedded OSes for the purpose or write a specific executive from scratch? For POC version, it might be faster to use a tweaked version of opensource executive.
6. Power consumption needs for ATC system should be sufficiently low and managable via small backup batteries charged by solar power or electric power or some other ways. Backup batteries should be automatically switched to, when power from regular electric supply and/or solar pannels is not available.
7. There needs to be non-comprisable/non-cheatable facility for cops to manually insert/update information for their signal/junction in ATC network, that can help divert traffic at neighbouring junctions in time to avoid traffic jams. This feature is something like manual override that will be useful in situations when some roads blocked for reasons like a VIP visit, some civic work going on a stretch etc.
8. If vehicles are incorporated with devices that kind of register their presence when vehicle passes through a signal, it can help in tracking the vehicle's movement.
   Further, if this device can be controlled to jam the vehicle's movement then defaulters can be stopped from escaping. However this feature is more likely to be misused than used.

Few links collected since july 2004

1. News@Nature : Beating the Lights
2. Roland Pique Paille's Technology Trends : Smarter Traffic
3. Siemens (UK) Traffic Controls
4. How does a traffic light detect that a car has pulled up and is waiting for the light to change?
5. Self Adapting Traffic Lights
6. SatNavTech introduces navigation system (The Hindu - June 29, 2005)

2. Improving navigation in city

Periodically a small map, depticting roads and landmarks in managed geographical zone, will be broadcasted by a low-power transmitting device with limited range, hosted at the signal, referred as zone management node in further discussion. When vehicle moves into the zone, appropriate hardware fitted in vehicle will receive this information and display it for user.

Some of the map contents could be static, in terms of big and registered landmarks like banks, hospital, theatres, police stations, places of worship, government offices, big food joints, traffic signal(s) and so on. It would be possible to feed or update the map via some remote device or simply by cable connection on some exposed port of zone management device. Other organisations that come up later than last manual update or otherwise should be able to register their presence dynamically, provided they have the appropriate devices for that.

Some of the issues that need to be addressed in this system, apart from hardware and firm/soft-ware at zone management node, vehicle end and organisation are -

1. Compact yet complete representation of map information allowing easy and efficient updation of map and also allowing feature additions and scalability. Assuming the static map fed to zone management node represents the layout of roads correctly and to scale, zone management node should be able to precisely map the location of dynamically (de)registering organisations (devices) based their relative locations, directions and distance wise, from itself.
2. How to decide the periodicity of map information broadcast? Broadcast should not be too often, but it should be in time for a receiving vehicle's driver to make right navigation decisions in zone?
3. How to decide zone sizes and thus power requirements for each broadcast?
4. How to secure system from miscreant messing up with system?
5. Organisations should be able to remove their entry from map, when their location is changed. Better would be to allow them to mark their entry in map in special way. In case user wants to know more about them, entry can indicate the address of new location. Of course, this facility is available via special devices possessed by organisations, that allows them to handle all this remotely.
6. Indication of one-ways, U-turns, no left/right turn etc. in map would be welcome addon.
7. Another useful addon would be to dynamically update traffic status on different roads, obtained via automated traffic control system and mark various roads by appropriate colour scheme.