Traffic management systems: A classification, review, challenges, and future perspectives

In cities, where the number of vehicles continuously increases faster than the available traffic infrastructure to support them, congestion is a difficult issue to deal with and it becomes even worse in case of car accidents. This problem affects many aspects of the modern society, including economic development, traffic accidents, increase in greenhouse emissions, time spent, and health damages. In this context, modern societies can rely on traffic management system to minimize traffic congestion and its negative effects. Traffic management systems are composed of a set of application and management tools to improve the overall traffic efficiency and safety of the transportation systems. Furthermore, to overcome such issue, traffic management system gathers information from heterogeneous sources, exploits such information to identify hazards that may potentially degrade the traffic efficiency, and then provides services to control them. With this question in mind, this article presents a classification, review, challenges, and future perspectives to implement a traffic management system.