[sumo-dev] Setting individual traffic light state via TraCI (follow up)

[Menno van der Woude <menno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

a while ago I patched SUMO to allow me set state for individual traffic 
lights via a Traci command (see the patch I sent on 23th July 2017). 
This worked, but I still would like to implement it in a more robust 
way, preferably:

- allow (via netedit) setting a property on a connection in an 
intersection; not a unique ID, because sometimes multiple connections 
will belong to group of lights controlled as a single phase. So it would 
be a string property called "TrafficLightId" or similar.
- add a Traci call that allows setting the trafficlight state for a 
'single' traffic light, where a 'single' traffic light means all 
connections that have a given value set for the "TrafficLightId" string 
property.

This scenario would, at least in my case, make it much more easy to 
control an intersection using Traci: I could thus easily set the 
TrafficLightId values for all connections of an intersection, and from 
my Traci client implementation, call a SetSingleTrafficLightState 
function, using those (not unique) Id values.
This as opposed to the current situation, where I have to closely look 
at the connections in Netedit, to determine their index in the traffic 
light state string (e.g. "yyyGGrr"), and subsequently map the traffic 
lights from my program to that indexed string.
The latter means much manual work and manually coding the named mapping 
of lights to the string. It is also very sensitive for mistakes. The 
former could be implemented in the Traci client in a much more generic way.

What is your view on this? I would be happy to take time to implement 
this, however, I wonder if this would be a feature that could find its 
way back into the SUMO master branch? Otherwise it would make little 
sense, as I would have rewind my changes onto the master branch very 
often. If this is a welcome addition, I would need some advice where to 
start with adding the named property to a connection, and how to add a 
textbox to the UI of netedit for this.

Thanks, kind regards,

Menno van der Woude
CodingConnected e.U. (Wien - Österreich)
E menno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
W www.codingconnected.eu