Red-signal delay scheme to prevent vehicle accidents at the intersection

Vehicle-to-vehicle collisions at intersections are increasing and much more danger than other regions. Researches using vehicle communication protocols such as VANET, WAVE have been carried out to prevent the accidents at intersection areas. However, those existing researches may have limitations to be used in real collision situations because the time of vehicle collisions at crossroad is much shorter than the time to react the accidents by using communication protocols. This paper proposes an effective method to prevent vehicle collisions at intersections using a smart traffic light system without vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The smart traffic light system estimates the time for each vehicle crossing an intersection to pass through it safely, and delays the red signal associated with the vehicle´s direction when an accident is expected. The performances of the proposed method are evaluated by using a simple simulation test, and it is shown the effectiveness of the proposed method considering general traffic flow assumptions and comparing with all red signal schemes.