On Movement of Emergency Services amidst Urban Traffic

Managing traffic in urban areas is a complex affair. The same becomes more challenging when one needs to take into account the prioritized movement of emergency vehicles along with the normal flow of traffic. Although, mechanisms have been proposed to model intelligent traffic management systems, a concentrated effort to facilitate the movement of emergency services amongst urban traffic is yet to be formalized. This paper proposes a distributed multi-agent based mechanism to create partial green corridors for the movement of emergency service vehicles such as ambulances, fire brigade and police vans, amidst urban traffic. The proposed approach makes use of a digital network of traffic signal nodes equipped with traffic sensors and an agent framework to autonomously extend, maintain and manage partial green corridors for such emergency vehicles. The approach was emulated using Tartarus, an agent framework over a LAN. The results gathered under varying traffic conditions and also several emergency vehicles, validate the performance of this approach and its effects on the movement of normal traffic. Comparisons with the non-prioritized and full green corridor approaches indicate that the proposed partial corridor approach outperforms the rest. Received on 27 February 2015; accepted on 02 April 2015; published on 01 December 2015