Oh  My ......We need to "Save our Selves"

The time has come when the need to take personal care of our movements on road cannot be overemphasized. While systems and regulations are bound to ensure orderliness, safety, convenience and direction for vehicles and pedestrians the ground realities present a different scenario.

When vehicles disregard rules and vie for space and time and pedestrians become impatient when their requirements go unheeded there is resultant chaos on the streets and roads. When different kind of vehicles like trucks to buses, from SUVs and MUVs to cars, from Trailers to Vans from Tuktuks to Auto rickshaws and from motorcycles to cycles one can well imagine the extent of confusion and commotion on the roads.

And with pedestrians interspersed the pandemonium Just like water flowing in the river lets and rivers find their own way traffic flow finds its own way. Unless it is regulated and managed comprehensively in an effective way just as water overflows and keeps rolling in chaotic fashion road traffic too would become difficult to manage.

Traffic threats and accident prone road spots have increased manifold in almost all cities and towns of the world. While travelers in ships and aircrafts send an SOS in times of distress the growing dangers to our lives have become equally grave. Though SOS stands for Save Our Souls; on the road we could well it use it for a meaningful directive “Save Our Selves”. When all government efforts cannot fully ensure our safety and survival we individual have to cooperate all the more to ensure safety for ourselves. Self help will be the best help.

Traffic congestion in urban road and freeway networks leads to a poor utilisation of the network infrastructure with increased travel times and poor energy efficiency. Current generation traffic control strategies are limited in the scale of the area that they can manage. For instance a single set of traffic signals at an intersection. This kind of an approach, often leads to inefficient coordination between the individual components of the network as they are controlled independently of one another.

The project has been designed address this issue by developing decentralised control methods that enable the network to be controlled by many distributed controllers, each responsible for a local area but interacting and collaborating with its neighbours. This approach is significantly more scalable as each local controller is generally only coupled to its neighbouring controllers and needs to solve a local problem involving itself and its neighbours. This allows the complexity of each local control problem to remain constant regardless of the size of the system. This integrated approach will enable significant improvements in the utilisation and throughput of the network as a whole.