Introduction

The Hamilton Public Transportation department wishes to bring some intelligence to the control of traffic in its downtown area. Since there are many one-way streets it should be possible to synchronize the traffic lights to facilitate traffic flow. Traffic flow is very similar to the flow of packets in a computer network, therefore it should be feasible to control the flow of traffic through a software defined network.

This assignment is more in the form of a knowledge base (or sometimes called a Book of Knowledge, for example see The Guide to the Software Engineering Book of Knowledge). You will be collecting and analyzing this project from several angles, and you will group your knowledge in various categories before proposing your design.

This is not a for-profit based project. It is a service-based project. In the end the hope is that traffic conditions in downtown Hamilton will be alleviated by a well-thought out centralized traffic controller. The implications are that proper traffic control will not only save the travellers' time and money for fuel, but the absence of vehicles idling at a stop light will be better for the environment.

Background information

The downtown area of Hamilton consists of the following:

As you can see from the map there are many one-way streets in downtown Hamilton. The goal is to synchronize these lights by some central controller such that a driver can drive through the downtown area in one direction at a certain speed without ever having to stop his/her car. The timing of these lights will determine the speed of the traffic.

Traffic Challenges

One can start this problem by assuming a perfectly ideal situation. This would mean one car on one road travelling in one direction. If you start with such a grid, you can determine the timing of the traffic lights to ensure that no one has to face a red light. In the following 55 grid, assume the lights are 500m apart (0.5km) making the grid 2km2km:

To approach this problem, answer the following questions in your submitted assignment:

1.Synchronize your lights so that one car travelling west to east can drive from one end of the grid to the other without stopping. What is the speed of this car?

2.Now synchronize your lights so that one car can travel from north to south from the top of the grid to the bottom without stopping. Can the synchronization of these lights (north to south) co-exist with the synchronization of the west-to-east lights?

3.Now synchronize all lights on this grid assuming there is one car on each of the five west-to-east road and one car on each of the five north-to-south road. Does your method of synchonization hold up? What is the speed of these cars?