Project overview
Modern urban traffic light control systems control thousands of traffic signals, but their core algorithms are based on first principles developed in the early 1980s. In many cases therefore they cannot reflect modern trade-offs between delays to different vehicle streams. While it is often shown that humans can out-perform current algorithms for a single road junction, the interactions between people controlling close proximity junctions where the decisions of one controller affect the situation faced by others, has never been formally investigated.
The Web enables users to experience issues from new standpoints, and researchers to understand how users respond in such situations, both individually and collectively. This project therefore creates a proof-of-concept of an interactive traffic simulation where road junctions are simultaneously and independently controlled by multiple humans in real time. Providing players with a bird’s eye view of approaching vehicles enables them to experience the complexity of balancing everyone’s needs at a junction, not just their own desires; analysing the red/green light decisions that they want to make in response to this view enables a better understanding of their priorities and what they perceive as a ‘fair to all’ system; and recording communications and interactions between users controlling adjacent junctions will form the basis of research into the next generation of real life traffic light control algorithms.
The Web enables users to experience issues from new standpoints, and researchers to understand how users respond in such situations, both individually and collectively. This project therefore creates a proof-of-concept of an interactive traffic simulation where road junctions are simultaneously and independently controlled by multiple humans in real time. Providing players with a bird’s eye view of approaching vehicles enables them to experience the complexity of balancing everyone’s needs at a junction, not just their own desires; analysing the red/green light decisions that they want to make in response to this view enables a better understanding of their priorities and what they perceive as a ‘fair to all’ system; and recording communications and interactions between users controlling adjacent junctions will form the basis of research into the next generation of real life traffic light control algorithms.
