A Hierarchical Framework for Intelligent Traffic Management in Smart Cities

Transportation infrastructure is undergoing major revolutions in most metropolitan areas, which demands for improved operational strategies to meet requirements of smart cities. Such requirements include more convenience more travelers, and higher levels of security, reliability, economics, and societal sustainability in our communities. Given that the wide-area situational awareness is enabled by advanced information and communication technologies, this paper develops a hierarchical operation framework for regulating traffic signals effectively and flexibly in dynamic traffic conditions. The proposed framework which is based on the multi-agent system manages to mitigate potential traffic congestions and minimize drivers' average travel time in metropolitan areas. Further traffic efficiency improvements can be achieved by the utilization of a closed-loop management system. Interactive simulations are conducted in this paper to examine the performance of the proposed framework in a real-world transportation system.