IOT-powered environment aware traffic management : a conceptual framework

Abstract

Vehicular traffic has increased across all over the world especially in urban areas. Many reasons including the reduction in the cost of vehicles, degradation of public transport services and increased wealth can be attributed to this increase in vehicles on the roads. The traffic congestion created by these vehicles creates many problems to both users of these vehicles and others including the government and policy makers. Increased environment pollution is one of the most serious negative effects of the increased traffic. Different noxious gases and fine particles emitted by the vehicle affect different people differently depending on their age and their present health conditions. Transport professionals and policy makers have come up with many schemes for better management of traffic in congestion prone areas. These schemes suffer from many shortcomings including inability to adapt to dynamic change of traffic patterns. With the development of technology, new applications like Google maps help drivers to select routes that are less congested. But, the identification of the best route depends only on the present traffic congestion on different road segments. In this paper the authors propose an application that help drivers select routes based on the present and expected environment population levels at critical points in a given area.