The concept of Smart City has lately been adopted by the research community, companies and public gobernants to summarize a set of advanced services devoted to make current cities more citizien friendly, efficient and sustainable. Traffic management, public transport scheduling, waste management, pollution control, or preventing and avoiding security threats are, among some of the most relevant, examples of problems that the Smart City has to deal with.
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.
Our solutions not only enable continuous traffic flows but reduce the pollution. A case study of Kocaeli in Turkey city allows us to validate the approach and show its benefits for other cities as well.