IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308 _______________________________________________________________________________________ Volume: 03 Special Issue: 15 | Dec-2014 | IWCPS-2014, Available @ http://www.ijret.org 108 A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON ROAD TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS P.M. Xavier 1 , Raju Nedunchezhian 2 1 Dean (Academic & Student Affairs), Toc H Institute Of Science & Technology, Kerala, India 2 Principal, Sri Ranganathar Institute of Engineering and Technology, TamilNadu, India Abstract With the rapid stress in infrastructure development by all nations across the world, better designed, engineered and constructed roads and highways have come up or are in different stages of implementation in rural and urban areas. With the improvement in automobile technology, lighter and high-speed vehicles are a common sight along the highways. The highway environment consists of fast and slow moving vehicles, traffic congestions particularly at traffic nodal points, collisions, accidents, bottlenecks, and all leading to unpredictability in traffic flow causing considerable loss of time, upsetting schedules, economic loss and environmental pollution. With the enhanced economic development, more and more automobiles will be on the road without commensurate improvement in road space. Having dynamic information on traffic density along highways and lateral roads will help in streamlining traffic flow. The state of road density is an important factor in evaluating travel times and travelling routes. A number of studies have been carried out on traffic management by mathematicians, engineers and town planners with varied outcomes. The studies are generally based on the volume, speed and density of vehicles on a given segment of road space using conventional traffic detection devices such as Inductive loops, magnetic loops, cameras, radars and modern Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications such as RF-Id, Wireless Sensors, VANETs and so on, each with its own limitations due to variations in prediction accuracy, environmental factors, data collection difficulties and cost. With the ubiquitous presence of mobile signals, it is now possible to monitor vehicular traffic flow along highways and lateral roads with a high degree of accuracy with minimum cost. This paper is a comparative study of existing systems for vehicular traffic management and to suggest the use of mobile signals for vehicular traffic management. Keywords: Traffic flow, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Vehicular traffic management --------------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. INTRODUCTION Vehicular traffic management is a major area of concern for town planners. The efforts by traffic managers and town planners to overcome traffic congestion are not achieving result as more and more vehicles are added to the road network day by day which exceeds the intended physical capacity of the road space. To tide over the traffic congestion and to ensure better traffic management, timely availability of dynamic traffic information with traffic managers are essential to regulate the traffic and divert the traffic to alternate routes. There are several sources providing traffic information to commuters through FM stations, GPS assisted systems. However these are not covering the entire segment of population as these systems have not become mass based. Several other devices and systems such as traffic sensors, inductive loop, magnetometer, infrared devices, acoustic, ultrasonic, visual camera, radar and laser systems. As these sensors are highly sensitive to environment such as weather changes like rain, fog etc, they are less effective and error prone, costly and needs regular maintenance. None of the methods mentioned above has proved its effectiveness on a long term basis. This paper is a comparative study and performance evaluation of various location finding techniques for mobile tracking and its application for studying traffic densities in highways and lateral roads. 2. EXISTING METHODS 2.1 Global Positioning Service (GPS) GPS is a space-based satellite navigation system that provides location and time information in all weather conditions [1]. Any mobile station can freely use this service with a GPS receiver which calculates its position by precisely timing the signals sent by GPS. The position can be calculated if the position of each satellite and the distance from the satellite (pseudo range) is known. For accurate results four or more satellites must be visible among the 24 satellites in 4 orbital planes as shown in figure 1. Fig- 1: Traffic detection system using GPS