Keywords

1 Introduction

In a developing infrastructure, roads are a piece of core unit in it, and it supports people and logistics movements, formation in the foundation of social and economic development and interconnecting cities, ports, projects and airports. There are various issues arising in this procedure, i.e., maintenance, development of roads, congestion and traffic and increasing population. For this, we propose a new system of roads which is a combination of information, communication and control techniques to integrate drivers, vehicles and roads properly. This system is called as intelligent transport system (ITS) which only aims to traffic-related issues along with many other ones (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Basic components used in ITS

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For which, we have set its applications focus on three issues of problems: Society, the road administrator and drivers. At societal level, it helps in decreasing accidents, environmental effects and reducing traffic. Similarly, at the level of road administrator, management of roads and traffic can be handled by identifying the hazardous locations and frequently congested areas using probe information collected by vehicles. And at last in case of drivers, we can get advantage in economic front such as reduced tolls, route detection and payments of tolls and parking. ITS provides just not only a convenient road traffic application along with the provision of the usage of variety of information and communication technologies that results to the generation of new employment and business opportunities along with economic development.

1.1 Problems Faced in Traffic Management System

Basic Problems Faced in Traditional Traffic management System:

Urbanization: Increase in population living in metropolitan and nearby cities for having better earning opportunities.

Increasing transportation demands: Along with increasing population, demands for better and cheap transportation also increase, due to which there is an increase of motor vehicles on roads.

Increasing pollution: Along with increasing vehicles, emission of pollutant gases like CO2 and other gases occur as the usage of fuels increases in sufficient amount.

Increasing traffic issues: Road safety and congestion.

1.2 Categorization of Intelligent Traffic and Transport Management System

Categorization of ITTMS is done on basis of infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less approaches. All the research work done in this field so far is basically categorized in infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less approaches. Parameters focused for dividing various approaches are design, goals, identification strategy, re-routing strategy and network challenges (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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ITTMS classification

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2 Comparison of Various Infrastructure-Based and Infrastructure-less ITTMS Approaches on Design and Goal Strategy

See Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 .
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Table 2 .
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3 Proposed Methodology

The challenge is to build a low-cost information platform for monitoring traffic flows and to bring that information from different parts of a city together so that it can be analyzed to enable better traffic management routines for mega-cities in low income countries. Present traffic flow monitoring techniques used in developed countries such as SCOOT cannot cope with the volume of traffic, which would go quickly wear out the SCOOT loops. In addition, newer systems such as ETSI-G5 technology for connected vehicles are very expensive. These systems work by having On Board Units (OBUs) and Roadside Units (RSUs), which are placed along the road infrastructure. Currently, an OBU and an RSU each cost over $1000 USD. So the solution being proposed is to use Bluetooth Low Power (BLE) devices. These devices communicate using Bluetooth technology and have a common coverage range of 70–100 m.

Since mobile phones also have Bluetooth interfaces, a lot of apps have been written to take data from the BLE device and use the mobile phone to communicate with a central server or navigational entity. Though what we are proposing does not remove such capability, the system we want to build is not be dependent on users having mobile phones. Instead, the BLE device will beacon every few seconds, and those beacons with their UUIDs will be picked up be WiFi/BLE gateways. The gateway devices cost £54 each, and this project will buy 50 of such gateways. These gateways will then use right wireless routers wireless routers, which will be connected to the University of Ghana’s communications network. This is an Ethernet network running at 1 Gbps. The data will be routed to a central server where it will be stored and processed and used to display traffic flows in real time.

The WiFi/BLE gateways will be placed on two very busy roads that border the University of Ghana. The first is called National Highway—4 or N4, which runs from north to south along the east side of the campus. In fact, it forms a direct boundary with the campus for 3.5 km. The second road is called the Haatso-Atomic road and runs from east to west on the north side of the campus and forms a natural campus boundary for 1.5 km. So in this proposal, we would like to monitor traffic from both roads making this a total of 5 km of road infrastructure that will be monitored. The data gathered will be analyzed to show the traffic flow along these roads. The results will be displayed using a virtual network computing (VNC) server; hence, the results will be available to all commuters in real time. Information will also be communicated using mobile phones as well as road signage such as overhead road gantries.

Proposed methodology has been organized into:

  1. (a)

    Research Design: The study is both exploratory and descriptive in nature. Exploratory research design has identified the related variables of the study and defined the research problem. The conceptual framework incorporating the relevant variables is also proposed through exploratory research. Thereafter, descriptive research design has been used to empirically test the proposed conceptual framework of the study and subjecting the data to statistical analysis.

  2. (b)

    Objectives of the Study:

  3. •

    Proper monitoring of traffic flow on roads using a low-cost solution will help in providing information and raising warning messages on timely basis to all the road users.

  4. •

    Identifying the pits, cracks on the roads, crocodile-shape roads, distraction caused due to any unwanted objects and unwanted breakers in order to prevent damage in the vehicles and road accidents. Main objective is to minimize the casualties/fatalities that happen on the road.

  5. •

    Objective is to provide the safety on Indian Roads by associating the risk associated with roads and to specify the ranking of roads on the basis of quality of roads.

  6. •

    By analyzing and retrieving the data from the vehicles regarding obstruction on the road in turn will be provided to the government in order to remove that obstruction. Objective is to provide congestion free and cost-effective driving experience to all road users.

  7. (c)

    Sampling Design:

    The sample for the study the city of Noida has been selected. We plan to collect the data regarding the roads condition and traffic conditions of the road near the Amity campus. To study will be performed on the road conditions using the sample size of 500 vehicles with BLE devices for communication and sensors like accelerometers embedded with them.

  8. (d)

    Data Collection Instruments:

    The basic data collection instruments are the sensor that is embedded on the vehicle.

  9. 1.

    Accelerometer

  10. 2.

    Gyro meter

  11. 3.

    Cameras

  12. 4.

    GPS

  13. 5.

    Smart phones with WiFi connectivity

  14. 6.

    Bluetooth

  15. 7.

    APP on smart phone for emergency messages.

  16. (e)

    Data Collection Method:

    The study is based on survey method of collecting initial information during the research process. Primary data is collected by researcher himself using survey method. It is a reliable way to collect the data because researcher knows where it came from and how it was collected and analyzed.

  17. (f)

    Statistical Techniques:

    The various data cleaning and analysis operations will be performed based on the data collected form the sensors and perform the analysis using statically operations used in the machine learning algorithm. The summarized tentative plan for the same has been described in the figure below.

  18. (g)

    Variables of the Study:

    Demographic variables such as gender, age, education, occupation, driving experience, driving training and type of vehicles are independent variables of the study, and factors such as risk perception and perception of driving tasks have been treated as exogenous variable and road safety attitude comprising five factors of traffic rules, personal responsibility, road safety and distraction on roads are treated as endogenous variable in the study (Fig. 3).

    Fig. 3
    figure 3

    Proposed model

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4 Challenges in ITTMS

In this section, various challenges faced in ITTMS are:

  • Homogenous and heterogeneous data collection and integration of data.

  • Managing large amount of data received from sensor is a tedious task.

  • Monitoring and surveillance of traffic condition.

  • Functionality similar to Google Maps for providing alternate route guidance.

  • SCOOT technology can only be used where the traffic flow is very less such as Yamuna Express Way or Agra-Luck now Expressway.

  • In addition to SCOOT, new technology was developed that is ETSI-G5 which is very expensive as it uses On Board Units and Road Side Units which are placed along with the road infrastructure.

  • Neither SCOOT nor ETSI-G5 talks about the safety of roads. Only monitoring or surveillance of vehicles is done using these technologies. This seems to be providing a costly incomplete solution in terms of all types of traffic flow.

  • Quality of the roads and accidents due to animals is not being considered in the literature as the factor for road accidents or damages in the vehicles.

  • Study of traffic congestion at traffic lights was not discussed in the literature.

5 Conclusion and Future Scope

This paper basically focuses on the various challenges faced in the traffic management system. An improvement in ITTMS is expected from the researchers and industrialists by identifying the various challenges and research gaps. Various researchers have already proposed different research schemes in order to strengthen the traffic flow and congestion of traffic. Basic analysis of all the researchers who have done their research in the field of TMS is done, and some gaps are identified as future work for other researchers. Proper monitoring of traffic flow on roads using a low-cost solution will help in providing information and raising warning messages on timely basis to all the road users. Identifying the pits, cracks on the roads, crocodile shaped-roads, distraction caused due to any unwanted objects and unwanted breakers in order to prevent damage in the vehicles and road accidents. Main objective is to minimize the casualties/fatalities that happen on the road. Objective is to provide the safety on Indian Roads by associating the risk associated with roads and to specify the ranking of roads on the basis of quality of roads. By analyzing and retrieving the data from the vehicles regarding obstruction on the road in turn will be provided to the government in order to remove that obstruction. Objective is to provide congestion free and cost-effective driving experience to all road users.