Insights from computational modeling and simulation towards promoting public health among African countries

Road accidents and fatalities among West African countries are as a result of inadequate and poor infrastructures, careless driver attitudes, vehicular factors and environmental factors ([1]; [2], [3], [4], [5]. However, a reduction in cases of vehicular collisions and road fatalities can be achieved with properly enhanced road signals and traffic systems. The aim of this research is to explore and adapt the knowledge of algorithms, computational modeling and simulation, towards promoting public health and safety. The objectives are to design, implement, and model the prototype of a wireless traffic control system suitable for a typical African environment. Therefore, a programming and simulation approach has been adopted and a model adequately defined to depict the experimental reality of the use of this prototype. This will go a long way to reduce the mortality rate recorded as a result of road-traffic accidents, thus prolonging the lives of more useful, intelligent, and productive citizens. The rate of environmental pollution will also be minimized. This will in turn improve the quality of health and life of the African citizens. It is hoped that the deployment of this prototype on a large scale among African countries, will help reduce the rate of road fatalities. This paper is organized as follows: review of relevant literature, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion and recommendation. 2. REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE Previous works have been done in the area of simulation and modeling of digital traffic lights [6]; Cremer and Ludwig [7], developed a prototype version of traffic lights based on Boolean operations; Oluwagbemi implemented a simple model version of digital traffic lights for reducing road accidents on African roads, however, his model design does not address the issues of epileptic electricity supply and other related challenges presently confronting some African localities [8] and the model also lacked opportunity for alternative sources of energy. Albagul and colleagues [9] developed a sensorbased prototype of a digital traffic light system. A Fuzzy approach was used by Hoyer and Jumar [10] to model traffic lights. The knowledge of Petri nets was adopted by Huang and Su [11] in modeling and analyzing traffic control systems. A wireless mesh network for traffic control systems was implemented by Lan and colleagues [12]. Tubaishat and colleagues proposed the integration of wirel