Smart Mobility by Optimizing the Traffic Lights: A New Tool for Traffic Control Centers

Urban traffic planning is a fertile area of Smart Cities to improve efficiency, environmental care, and safety, since the traffic jams and congestion are one of the biggest sources of pollution and noise. Traffic lights play an important role in solving these problems since they control the flow of the vehicular network at the city. However, the increasing number of vehicles makes necessary to go from a local control at one single intersection to a holistic approach considering a large urban area, only possible using advanced computational resources and techniques. Here we propose HITUL, a system that supports the decisions of the traffic control managers in a large urban area. HITUL takes the real traffic conditions and compute optimal traffic lights plans using bio-inspired techniques and micro-simulations. We compare our system against plans provided by experts. Our solutions not only enable continuous traffic flows but reduce the pollution. A case study of Malaga city allows us to validate the approach and show its benefits for other cities as well.