Project Structure

Project Aim

The aim of this project is to simulate a traffic controller that controls vehicles arriving into and leaving out of an intersection

For this project, I am going to assume that an intersection simply a meeting of 2 or more roads. We can treat each road to have 2 directions each (assume roads are not one way). Here I use the word 'direction' as a substitute for traffic input
For simplicity, I haven't distinguished between the actual directions that cars arriving into a direction want to go. For example, in a 4 way intersection-- left, right and straight turning traffic.

I have treated a direction in this project as particular inflow of traffic into an intersection.
An intersection has 4 directions, north, east, south and west
The inflow of traffic for a particular direction follows a normal distribution around a mean > 0

Application should have the ability to run both autonously with no interaction from a user, or be run as directed by a user
The application should have a command line interface to start and end the application

Application should function with minimal delay between cycles of traffic
Code should be made as modular as possible. This makes things easier to debug, test and expand later on
There should be documentation throughout
Code should be both unit and integration tested
Code should be robust and be able to handle a variety of input data.=

Class to represent traffic flow for one direction
Contains attribute for the wait times for each vehicle in this direction, stored as a list
Attribute for the average flow of traffic for this direction, arbitary number
Method to find the total wait time of all vehicles for a particular direction

Class to represent a collection of Directions forming a complete intersection
Methods to add new vehicles to each direction after a cycle
Represents the state of an actual intersection
Attribute for a cyclic linked list of Direction objects. This makes it easy for a Controller object to cycle through each direction. The idea is to start at North, then go counter clockwise to west. When the west direction is reached, it's next pointer points to north, and then the whole thing starts off again. In practice this can allow for virtually any number of directions
Method to add a new direction to the intersection
Method that adds new vehicles to the intersection, not sure if this should be in Controller or Intersection
Method to add waiting time to each of the vehicles in an intersection after letting one direction through the intersection

Command line application that presents the current state of this application
User is able to start the application, and view the average wait time for each of the directions.
After each cycle letting a direction through the intersection, the user should be prompted to go through the next cycle
Should have a Controller object attribute that it interfaces with