Hardware Software Co-simulation for Traffic Load Computation Using Matlab Simulink Model Blockset

Due to increase in number of vehicles, Traffic is a major problem faced in urban areas throughout the world. This document presents a newly developed Matlab Simulink model to compute traffic load for real time traffic signal control. Signal processing, video and image processing and Xilinx Blockset have been extensively used for traffic load computation. The approach used is Edge detection operation, wherein, Edges are extracted to identify the number of vehicles. The developed model computes the results with greater degrees of accuracy and is capable of being used to set the green signal duration so as to release the traffic dynamically on traffic junctions. Xilinx System Generator (XSG) provides Simulink Blockset for several hardware operations that could be implemented on various Xilinx Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The method described in this paper involves object feature identification and detection. Xilinx System Generator provides some blocks to transform data provided from the software side of the simulation environment to the hardware side. In our case it is MATLAB Simulink to System Generator blocks. This is an important concept to understand in the design process using Xilinx System Generator. The Xilinx System Generator, embedded in MATLAB Simulink is used to program the model and then test on the FPGA board using the properties of hardware co-simulation tools.