IDUTC: an intelligent decision-making system for urban traffic-control applications

The design of systems for intelligent control of urban traffic is important in providing a safe environment for pedestrians and motorists. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) (learning systems) and expert systems (knowledge-based systems) have been extensively explored as approaches for decision-making. While the ANNs compute decisions by learning from successfully solved examples, the expert systems rely on a knowledge base developed by human reasoning for decision making. It is possible to integrate the learning abilities of an ANN and the knowledge-based decision-making ability of the expert system. This paper presents a real-time intelligent decision-making system, IDUTC, for urban traffic control applications. The system integrates a backpropagation-based ANN that can learn and adapt to the dynamically changing environment and a fuzzy expert system for decision-making. The performance of the proposed intelligent decision-making system is evaluated by mapping the adaptable traffic light control problem. The application is implemented using the ANN approach, the FES approach, and the proposed integrated system approach. The results of extensive simulations using the three approaches indicate that the integrated system provides better performance and leads to a more efficient implementation than the other two approaches.