Friday, March 19, 2010

Services in real life: Traffic Management Service: How Granularity affects service behaviour and efficiency

SOA Service concepts can be found in real life too. Some time ago, outside my office, road workers were replacing and reprogramming the traffic lights at a roundabout. When I saw the result of what they were doing I realized that the traffic light services and corresponding traffic management system can illustrate how a (SOA) service approach affects many of the service orientation design principles.

My office in Maastricht, Netherlands

For years I have watched the traffic light sequence outside my office. When walking across the street I did not need to press the button for pedestrians because I knew the sequence of the traffic lights by heart. I also remember that at any given time, only one lane of cars would be allowed and one group of pedestrians would be allowed to cross. Also, all traffic must stop before a new configuration was activated. This had resulted in small traffic jams all centered around this roundabout during busy hours and at times of sudden bursts of traffic.

Take a look at this street plan:
The roundabout

The actual situation is a bit more complex with bus and cab lanes, bicycle roads etc. but for illustrating this schematic should suffice. It's a Dutch roundabout so the traffic moves counterclockwise as indicated. (The dark surface in the top right corner is part of my office :))




  • A ... E are the car traffic lights. 
  • R ... X are pedestrian crossing traffic lights 

The old situation as mentioned, would be that at any given time, only one lane can drive the roundabout. ie. lights ABF is green, or CFE etc. Also, the pedestrian lights would only be green at one street at a time, ie. RS, TU, or VWX. Sometimes, all traffic has to stop in order to allow pedestrians to cross. This describes a very inflexible way of managing traffic. The reason for allowing all traffic to pass from a certain point of view, was optimisation: if a traffic stream is moving, make sure all of it moves. Because no real-time feedback was given to the system, the system would be in a certain configuration for a long period of time. This same configuration would be applied over and over again, endlessly without any change due to traffic load or time of day. Because the system is not interlinked with the rest of the infrastructure in the neighborhood, it was an optimized system from the local perspective, but not at all optimized to operate in the bigger picture. This is a typical example of a situation where optimization on micro level is counter-productive on macro level.


Assuming the TMS would be an SOA Service, the following observations can be made:
  • Autonomy of a certain traffic light was poor as it would only be allowed to operate in specific sequences of configurations 
  • A "Stop all" configuration was necessary between all configuration changes. This restricted the maximum switching frequency 
  • Granularity of the service composition (TLS) was poor as complete road paths would be switched at any given time, not individual lanes or lights. 
Overall throughput would be low because of the dead time in the 'stop all' configuration and the time when a specific configuration was active with no or a low volume of cars present. After replacing the lights, a number of important improvements were made:
  1. the system would allow partial pedestrian crossings (ie. only T or U instead of 'all or nothing') 
  2. the system would allow for individual control of two lanes at the same insertion point (ie. one lane for straight ahead and one for right turn) 
  3. the system would measure traffic load to accommodate for bursts in traffic coming from a certain direction 
  4. the system would be linked into the network of traffic lights in the surrounding infrastructure a 'green wave' to allow for traffic to leave the part of town fairly unhindered by the network of traffic lights. 
Because the granularity is increased (smaller parts which are individually configurable) the system allows for greater controllability:
  • optimized configurations are possible to allow for the throughput of traffic stressed lanes 
  • empty lanes do not unnecessarily get 'green' time 
  • special configuration sequences are allowed for busy hour traffic flow improvement 
  • pedestrians can be allowed to cross half of the lane without impacting the flow of traffic in that lane; shortly after the pedestrians are allowed to cross half-way, the remaining part is given a green light. 
  • timing the macro-level optimized configurations with the rest of the surrounding infrastructures' traffic lights. 
When making the analogy to service orientation, we see that the same concepts apply:

The overall road infrastructure can be considered a service inventory: all relevant infrastructure elements are managed in the same (domain) service inventory. We are assuming a domain service inventory here as all service configurations are probably limited to a certain geographic area in town. Potentially other service inventories exist with different rules, principles and configurations to manage different kinds of traffic.

Traffic Orchestration and Traffic Management services

The traffic management service (TMS) consists of a collection of coordinated traffic light services (TLS) each representing an individual traffic light. The traffic lights themselves are the smallest configurable service available (they can be configured red, amber or green). This is the defined service granularity (*) for this roundabout.

Because the granularity is better, more complex, optimized service compositions can be created.

The inter-intersection "infrastructure level" synchronization would probably be implemented as a service orchestration (**), the intersection or roundabout level light configurations as service compositions, managed by another service composition controlling when a certain configuration is necessary, based upon the input it receives from sensors in the road.

(*) A note on service granularity: there is no 'rulebook' on service granularity. The 'appropriate' level of service granularity depends on many factors. Any smaller configurable service components, like on LED level - ie. a green, red or amber light consists of approx. 350 LEDs - would probably result in management chaos, as each LED must be individually controlled to comprise a certain configured color of traffic light. Any larger service components than traffic-light level granularity would probably result in the same situation which we had in the 'old traffic light' setup where ie. all traffic must stop to allow pedestrians to cross the roundabout at configuration TU, a case of poor service autonomy.

Conclusion: Because all traffic lights can be controlled individually the autonomy and composability of the services are higher when compared to the old setup.

(**) Note: The example mentions orchestration, although the term choreography would probably be better suitable here. The orchestrated individual parts (TMS) have a certain amount of autonomy not controllable from the orchestration level. 'Despite' the orchestration level, the TMS can allow other traffic to cross the roundabouts or intersections as well, to service other consumers to using the service, even during busy times.

In the light of this post, I would like to encourage everyone to see how service orientation and real-world examples are really not that far apart. Whether it be a traffic light service or a service based economy, numerous similarities can be found. No, I'm not implying this applies at all times, but.... try :)

Websequencediagrams.com:
TOS-->TMS: Orchestrate intersections note right of TOS: Traffic Orchestration Service:\nControls all intersections\nin a part of town note right of TMS: Traffic Management Service:\ncontrols at the intersection level TMS-->TLS: Control Service Compositions TLS-->TLS: Red(), Amber() or Green() note right of TLS: Traffic Light Services:\ncontrols at individual\ntraffic light level opt note right of TMS: one for every extra\ntraffic light in a composition TMS-->TLS: Control Service Compositions TLS-->TLS: Red(), Amber() or Green() end

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