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Implementation of Traffic Light Controlling System for a Simple Intersection

with VHDL using Quartus II

Article in International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology · July 2023
DOI: 10.32628/IJSRST5231046

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 International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology
Available online at : www.ijsrst.com

Print ISSN: 2395-6011 | Online ISSN: 2395-602X doi : https://doi.org/10.32628/IJSRST5231046

Implementation of Traffic Light Controlling System for a Simple

Intersection with VHDL using Quartus II
Pranajit Kumar Das
Computer Science and Engineering Department, Sylhet Agricultural University, Bangladesh

ARTICLEINFO ABSTRACT

In the era of urbanization in the 21st century, the number of vehicles on

Article History:
the road has increased drastically to cope with the increased population of
Accepted: 01 July 2023 the city which directly affects the traffic on the street and more
Published: 14 July 2023 importantly on intersections. Automatic traffic signaling system can plays
a vital role to mitigate vehicle congestion in the critical intersections of the
busy roads. To ensure hassle free mobility of vehicles in the intersection on
Publication Issue the street, the appropriate traffic signal lights are necessary that coordinate
Volume 10, Issue 4 traffic in various directions on the streets. A simple intersection on the
July-August-2023 road is considered for the simulation of traffic signaling system. VHDL
code was written in Quartus II to implement traffic light system for
Page Number specific intersections on the road. The vehicles are always moving on the
111-117 main road, meaning green light is always ‘1’ until there are vehicles
approaching the side road. When the vehicles arrive on the side road
which is sensed by sensor, then the traffic controller takes the initiative to
schedule the traffic light, from green to red light in the main road and red
to green light in the side road. The proposed traffic signaling system works
properly, which is verified during simulation. In this paper, simple
intersection is considered due to simple design and easy implementation.
Keywords: Traffic light system, Road Intersection, VHDL, Quartus II, State
transition diagram, Simulation

I. INTRODUCTION compared to the increased number of vehicles in a

city. Therefore, the traffic jams on the road have
With the rapid economic development globally, increased day by day and are becoming more crucial
especially in middle income countries, the number of in intra-city communication. Traffic jams are a block
automobiles and cars also increased promptly. There situation on the road, caused by several factors, i.e.,
is a challenge of traffic on road due to the developed road infrastructure, number of vehicles in
inconsistency in the development of roads in the city the city, traffic signalling system, etc. Traffic jams

Copyright © 2023 The Author(s): This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative 111
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial use provided the original author and source are credited.
 Pranajit Kumar Das et al Int J Sci Res Sci & Technol. July-August-2023, 10 (4) : 111-117

result in slower vehicle speed, require more travel traffic control system, several individual operators are
time, long vehicle queue on the intersection, waste of working consistently to work effectively. An
fuel energy, air pollution affect human health, verbal automatic traffic signalling system collects vehicle
and physical confrontation on the road, and accidents information from the road intersection, analyses and
[1][2]. performs accordingly with the traffic situation in
Traffic controlling system is about more than intersection [3]. Traffic controlling system ensures
maintaining and directing vehicles on the road. trouble-free vehicle flow on road which minimizes
Because of unplanned urbanization, roads in the cities the driving time, number of vehicles comes to stop at
became more congested day by day, due to large a time, reduce air pollution, and decrease accidents.
volume of peoples are on the roads for their daily There are three colours in any traffic controlling
works. An automatic traffic controlling system is an system, namely, red, green, and yellow (Red-Yellow-
integral part of an effective transportation system in a Green). Those three-color lights control the traffic
city. Here are some reasons traffic control systems are flows in road intersections.
so important.

▪ Safety: A traffic control system ensures safety for

pedestrians, passengers, drivers, and finally for
vehicles. A roadway system without traffic
control may become more dangerous.
▪ Smooth movement: In a road intersection, there
must be a traffic control system to direct the
vehicle on the road. Without maintaining a
predefined order in vehicle direction, there
would be chaos at road intersections and around
intersection areas.
▪ Decrease frequency and severity of road
accidents: The traffic signaling system helps to Figure 1: Colour of traffic light with meaning.
decrease frequency of accidents at intersection
and around intersection areas. Drivers become Traffic lights, frequently called traffic signals, are
more aware at intersection areas about traffic usually situated in pedestrian crossings, road
flows, so the accident become less impactful. intersections, and other locations on the road to
▪ Fuel efficiency: Traffic control system improves control the traffic flows [4]. Currently, modern traffic
the environmental condition as it reduces the lighting systems are successfully installed and used
time vehicles spend on the road. Usually, the smoothly in various cities around the world. Most
more time vehicles spend on the road, the more traffic signal controlling systems have a fixed time
carbon they emit. cycle which doesn’t consider the number of vehicles
approaching the directions. This system only switches
Traffic management and control is crucial element in the light at fixed time intervals. The limitation of this
any transportation system for safe and systematic system is sometimes the vehicles wait at empty
operation. Operational guidelines, rules, laws, and junction when the red light is on for a cycle. A lot of
devices for signs, and lights are some of the researchers made contributions on these issues and
components of any traffic control system. In a road various improvement has already been made by using

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 Pranajit Kumar Das et al Int J Sci Res Sci & Technol. July-August-2023, 10 (4) : 111-117

sensing devices (sensor) on the lanes with the traffic B. Dilip et al [9] implemented a FPGA based low-cost
lights which mitigates the chances of unnecessary traffic light controlling system using ChipScope Pro
waiting for red signal on empty junctions. More and Virtual Input Output. The hardware
recent traffic signalling systems have applied various implementation of their design was executed using
machine learning approaches which makes the system Spartan-3E FPGA. It was complex and real-time
more sophisticated and real-time. Machine learning traffic management system in Kingdom of Bahrain,
(ML) algorithms enable traffic controllers to store for pedestrians. The authors in [10] proposed a traffic
vehicle information and measure future waiting time prediction and signal controlling system using the
for the vehicles on the lane, where optimized actions help of IoT devices for a smart city. They used the
are taken with lowest waiting time. OWENN (optimized weight Elman neural network)
algorithm for traffic prediction and Intel 80286
In this paper, a traffic lighting system for a simple microprocessor for traffic signal controlling system.
intersection is designed using VHDL and Their proposed system involves 5 (five) steps- first,
implemented in Quartus II software platform. The traffic data is collected for the dataset and the
outline of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 information is extracted. Then the extracted data are
presents the literature reviews about traffic signalling fed into OWENN classifier as input to find traffic flow.
systems using VHDL. The problem statement is OWENN algorithm achieves 98.23% accuracy and
described in section 3. Furthermore, Section 3 covers 96.69% F-score over the existing model. In [11], the
a simulation of the proposed traffic light system, and implementation and simulation of real time traffic
the simulation result and discussion are demonstrated light signalling system using FPGA and micro-
in section 4. Finally, Section 5 provides the conclusion controller. FPGA and micro-controller were
of this paper. programmed on the Spartan 3E and Arduino platform,
respectively. The system was designed with FPGA
II. LITERATURE REVIEW connected to an electronic circuit board on Spartan
3E through the external expansion and used an
An A lot of research work has been conducted on Arduino platform connected to the same electronic
traffic light controlling systems by various renowned circuit board. In simulation, C++ and VHDL language
researchers worldwide. The aim of those conducted is used for Arduino and FPGA programming,
research work was to solve various problems respectively. A few hardware components like sensors,
associated with traffic controlling systems, several switches, LEDs, and resistors are used to build the
exclusive developments were made but sometimes fail electronic circuit to ensure the best performance of
to work with complex real time situation [5][6]. the traffic light controlling system.
Traffic light controlling system can be implemented The authors in [12] designed and implemented a
using FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), traffic light controlling system based on density using
Microcontroller and ASIC (Application Specific GSM for the 4-way road with eight phases. Three PIC
Integrated Circuit) design. FPGA exhibits many 16F877A microcontrollers are used for logic design
benefits over microcontrollers are performance and control, one specially allocated for each of the three
amount of input/output. On the other hand, the ASIC sets objectives. The PIC 16F877A microcontrollers is a
design is more costly than FPGA [7][8]. This in-depth CMOS FLASH-based 8-bit microcontroller with RISC
literature reviews section presents some recent architecture that allows sufficient pins for the three
research works. sets of objectives. Eight pressure (PR) sensors are used
on each side of four roadways. C programming

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language is used to write the set of instructions for the IV. IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY
microcontroller to operate. In literature [13], the
authors overcome the limitation of fixed time slot in This experimental work was performed on a PC with
traffic controlling system. They proposed a traffic Windows environment where the OS (operating
controlling system with FPGA and sensors that system) was Windows10, SSD 1T, 16 GB RAM, and
decreases the waiting time. The scheduling of red, NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 with 16 GB Memory.
yellow, and green light depends on vehicle density on The Intel Quartus II Web Edition Design Software,
the road intersection. They implemented and tested Version 13.1 which is a full featured EDA product
the proposed system on hardware using ALTERA that was used for the simulation and VHDL
Cyclone II- FPGA. programming.
The traffic signaling system for described problem
III.PROBLEM STATEMENT statement is simulated in Quartus II software.
Simulation software is used to assess a new design,
A junction (intersection) of two one-way roads is identify problems in a present system and verify a
considered in this study, where one road is main road system under conditions that are difficult to
(R1) and other is side road (R2), both roads intersect reproduce. In simulation, software permits authority
each other. One sensor is used at the side roadway to to test, compare, and optimize the results by
sense the presence of vehicles on the sideroad. modelling real world events in a virtual environment.
By default, it is assumed that the vehicles are cars are
moving on the main road and there are no cars in the
side road. There is a sensor on the side road to sense
the presence of the vehicle on the side road. Then the
traffic controller transfer light signal for traffic
management or to control traffic flow from the side
road to main road. For transferring control of traffic
lights from main road to side road, there are four
states of traffic lighting are defined, which are S0, S1,
S2, and S3. The states, their lighting conditions, and
state flow are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Considered Road junction for designed

simulation work.

The traffic light (signal) on the main road (R1) is

always green. When any vehicle sensed by sensor on
side road (R2) in waiting, the traffic microcontroller
first warns the vehicle on main road by yellow light
and then red light to stops. The green light on side
road turns on and vehicle runs.

Figure 3: State flow diagram.

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At start, the green light is ‘1’ (on) in the main road

(R1) and the red light is ‘1’ (on) in the side road (R2),
which is called state S0. The traffic light conditions at
state S0 are listed below-

In state S0:
Red (R1) =0, Yellow (R1) =0, Green (R1) =1
Red (R2) =1, Yellow (R1) =0, Green (R2) =0

When the sensor placed in the side road (R2) sense

vehicle on the side road, the traffic controller warns
the vehicles on the main road (R1) by turning on the
yellow light. This state is called state S1. Just after 3 Figure 4 : Mnemonic Document State Diagram
seconds, the green light become on in the side road
(R2), which is called state S2. The lighting conditions The overall working methodology is shown in Figure
of state S1 and S2 are shown below- 4. According to the traffic flow in the road, the traffic
In state S1: signalling light, green, yellow, and red (G-Y-R) light
work in turn. The initial state is R1G_R2R means
Red (R1) =0, Yellow (R1) =1, Green (R1) =0 green on in main road and red on in the side road.
Red (R2) =1, Yellow (R1) =0, Green (R2) =0 The source and destination state are remains same if
the sensor have no data. The controller takes 10
In state S2: seconds when transfer from green to yellow. Yellow
Red (R1) =1, Yellow (R1) =0, Green (R1) =0 to red takes 3 seconds. In the proposed roadway, there
Red (R2) =0, Yellow (R1) =0, Green (R2) =1 are 8 source states and 8 destination states.

When there are no vehicles in the side road, the

traffic controller transfer to state S0 through S3. The
lighting conditions of S3 are listed below-

In state S3:

Red (R1) =1, Yellow (R1) =0, Green (R1) =0

Red (R2) =0, Yellow (R1) =1, Green (R2) =0

The mnemonic document state diagram of this

methodology is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 5: State machine viewer with condition of

state transition where Fig. 4(a) State of the machine
and Fig. 4(b) Conditions for the transition of the state.

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V. SOFTWARE SIMULATION RESULT AND after defined time it becomes yellow for 3 second
DISCUSSION before red light being ‘high’.

The proposed traffic signalling system was built using

VHDL (Very High-Speed Integrated Circuit
Hardware Description Language) on Quartus II. After
compilation and debugging, the VHDL code was
simulated using Quartus II software platform. The aim
of this software was to fully test whether the traffic
light controller design goal is achieved or not. After Figure 6 : Timing diagram.
successful compilation of the VHDL code, the register
transfer language (RTL) schematics diagram as well as When the sensor data is low (no vehicles in the side
a state machine diagram were automatically generated. road), the green light becomes ‘high’ in the main road
RTL viewer file can be viewed as a gate level after specified time. The red light becomes ‘high’ in
schematic. The register transfer language (RTL) the side road at the same time. The traffic light
schematics for the proposed traffic light controlling conditions are RYG=001 and RYG=100 in the main
system are shown in Figure 5. road and side road, respectively.
The automatic generated timing diagram during
simulation is shown in Figure 6. From the very VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
beginning, the traffic light condition on the main road
(R1) is RYG=001 as shown in the timing diagram. A traffic light controlling system for simple
intersections was designed and simulated successfully
using VHDL in Quartus II software. There is an
intersection between the main road and the side road.
The reason behind the simple intersection was easy
and successful implementation in software simulation.
The vehicles are always moving on the main road,
meaning green light is always ‘on’ until there are
vehicles approaching the side road. When the
vehicles arrive on the side road, then the traffic
controller takes the initiative to schedule the traffic
Figure 6: RTL viewer light. This case is implemented using VHDL
programming language in Quartus II software. State
Whenever the sensor in the side road (R2) sense the transition diagram with condition, timing simulation
presence of the vehicle (sensor is high), the yellow diagram, and RTL viewer were generated to test the
light turn ‘high’ in main road (R1) means RYG=010 in accuracy and functionality. In this paper, the real-
main road and RYG=100 in the side road. After 3 world road intersections are not considered because of
second delay, the red and green light turn ‘high’ in simple design and easy implementation. This paper
the main road (R1) and side road (R2), respectively. would be helpful for researchers in this field. The
The traffic light condition is RYG=100 in main road future research focuses on vehicle density-based
(R1) and RYG=001 in the side road (R2). The green traffic signal controlling systems.
light becomes ‘high’ for 10 second in the side road and

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algorithm. International Journal of Computer
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FPGA implementation of an advanced traffic

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