Intelligent Traffic Management System for Prioritizing Emergency Vehicles in a Smart City (TECHNICAL NOTE)

Traffic congestion worldwide has led to loss of human lives due to failure in transporting accident victims, critical patients, medical equipment and medicines on time. With the unending growth in vehicular traffic everywhere, Internet of Things (IOT) and Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) have embarked as a promising platform for an Intelligent Traffic Management System (ITMS). Many researches have been done to clear emergency vehicles, but they have not only failed to meet the target travel time of an emergency vehicle, but also failed to provide solutions, when traffic signals are hacked. This paper proposes an intelligent traffic management system for a Smart City that is inspired by the concepts of IoT and VANET. In the proposed solution, emergency vehicles are scheduled to prioritize them for a smooth passage through the traffics based on incident type. It not only navigates ambulances in finding the shortest possible paths till their destination, but also presents a solution to detect and respond to hacking of traffic signals. To show the superiority of our proposed system, a simulated environment modeling actual roads and vehicle movements has been demonstrated using CupCarbon simulator. Comparative results exhibits superior performance of our proposed system over the other recently proposed ITS for emergency vehicles, in terms of both congestion avoidance, transmission delay, travel time and respond to hacking.