Proceedings of the 24th International Conference

on Automation & Computing, Newcastle University,

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 6-7 September 2018

Intelligent Transport System: An Important

Aspect of Emergency Management in Smart
Cities
Fehda Malik, Munam Ali Shah, Hasan Ali Khattak
Department of Computer Science
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract— An intelligent transport system (ITS) is a difficult to tackle. This non-recurring traffic
vital part of smart cities in order to manage smooth congestion can be a cause of sudden traffic volume
traffic on highways. An active framework is required increase on roads. As compared to the recurring
to manage a smooth traffic on the roads. An traffic congestion, detection of non-recurring traffic
excessive growth in urban population is a big congestion is critical[3]. It requires real-time traffic
challenge for smart cities. Unorganized traffic shows information and evaluation with appropriate traffic
current reality of cities. The current road management decisions in real time. An Intelligent
infrastructure cannot cope with the increased number Traffic Management System aims at managing
of vehicles on the roads. This problem can be tackled traffic effectively during emergencies through the
through the use of Information and the use of information and communication technologies
communication technologies (ICT). ITS will reduce and efficient algorithms. Intelligent Traffic System
delays, traffic congestions, energy consumption and (ITS) plays critical roles in responding to
the pollution emission caused by the long delays on emergencies by minimizing traffic congestions on
roads. This paper presents a framework for roads. ITS is inevitable for not only assuring the
intelligent traffic system that will reduce the waiting safety of the citizens but also for many other
time for vehicles on the signal. The performance and applications. Implementing an efficient traffic system
the scalability of the proposed framework was solves many traffic problems and gives an efficient
evaluated through experiments. The results exhibit a smart parking system, an intelligent route
significant amount of reduction in waiting time for management system for vehicles, an intelligent traffic
vehicles on the signal. This will help in controlling prediction system and a lot more. A smart parking
the traffic problems efficiently and eventually system will help the citizens finding free parking lots
reducing the number of casualties caused by road online and hence will not only save the time but also
accidents. reduce the traffic congestion on roads. A route
management system will guide the citizens the best
Keywords-smart cities; intelligent traffic system; possible routes to their destinations without getting
congestion; emergency stuck in traffic congestions.
Road traffic congestion is one of the most
I. INTRODUCTION challenging issues that present urban traffic system is
Traffic congestion is considered one of the main facing on daily basis[4]. This traffic congestion
challenges being faced in cities on daily basis. Roads impacts the traffic flow in various ways. Among
and transport system have not been made these impacts, the delay in emergency response is the
equivalently efficient with respect to the exponential most critical as it might involve cost in terms of
increase in the urban population[1]. The world human deaths and injuries such as in case of
population is growing rapidly due to which the accidents, fire, and terrorist attacks. Fig. 1 gives an
demand for smart city initiative has been made more overview of such situation.
clear[2]. It is the main concern for traffic Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETS, social
management authorities and experts. The recurring networks, sensor networks, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V),
traffic congestion appears at the same place and at vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technologies are
the same time every day and is easy to manage. enabling transformational technologies for
Whereas the non-recurring traffic congestion, transportation. Today, the ability to manage traffic
which occurs randomly like an unplanned event is efficiently has increased tremendously due to the
sensor and vehicular network. Through this network,
a huge amount of data is generated which can help in

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making real-time decisions for intelligent traffic II. RELATED WORK
management In this paper, an intelligent and novel
traffic control system is presented. The presented In [7], a system is proposed that uses vehicular ad
system has the capability to overcome urban traffic hoc networks (VANETs) to perform aggregation of
problems. There are four main participants in the real-time speed and information of each individual
proposed system. i) Vehicles ii) Traffic lights vehicles for the optimization of signals at the
controller iii) Road Side Units and iv) Traffic control intersections. The traffic control problem is
management. Traffic lights are considered a vital part formulated as job scheduling problem in processors
of an intelligent traffic system (ITS) in order to have where jobs correspond to the platoons of vehicles.
a control over traffic[ The traffic simulator used is the TCL scripter traffic
5]. The roadside units may consist of sensors or simulator. The TCL scripter simulator is an open
CCTV cameras[6]. These RSU will collect and source portable microscopic traffic simulation
generate data regarding traffic. The collected data is package written in C++ and is designed to handle
then sent in real time to the traffic control large vehicular traffic. The performance of the OAF
management. The proposed system will detect the algorithm and the VANET-enabled vehicle-actuated
traffic status in a fast and adaptive fashion. The control, an optimized fixed time signal control, and
crucial part of the proposed system is designing of VANET-enabled Webster’s method, has been
efficient communication and control algorithms that analyzed. These algorithms are implemented based
coordinate the functions of all components of the on the information provided by the vehicles. Then
proposed system. these algorithms are compared under different traffic
The proposed system considers the Adaptive traffic conditions. Results show that OAF performed more
lights, which respond to the state of the road without efficiently as compared to other algorithms. It
having a preset time for them. The adaptive systems minimizes the delays vehicles experienced on
use detectors to gather information about the state of intersections. When experienced under heavy traffic
the road, which is in turn, entered into algorithms to load, the OAF algorithm’s performance degenerates
adjust the traffic signal time. to that of the vehicle-actuated traffic technique but
still causes lower delays as compared to other
methods under consideration.

In [8], an architecture of a Traffic Management

System (TMS) has been proposed to provide efficient
emergency services in smart cities. The smart cities
here, refer to the cities that are already equipped with
smart infrastructure and in those cities, most of the
vehicles are advanced and carry advance
communication technologies. The dynamic adaptive
TMS design consists of various separate components
that coordinate with each other. These components
include Traffic Management Controller (TMC),
Adaptive Traffic Light Controllers, Local Traffic
Controller (LTC), Environmental Sensor Controllers
and the Connected Vehicle System. The Connected
Vehicle System usually contain onboard processing
units, advanced wireless communication capabilities,
GPS navigation, and applications. The TMC gathers
the traffic data from all the LTCs in planted in each
sub-area in order to achieve a global view on the
Fig. 1: An emergency scenario often seen in cities. condition of the traffic within its area, then it gives
recommendations or decisions regarding the most
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: section efficient adaptation in order to satisfy the emergency
II consists of the related work, section III contains the service request and reduce the incurred disruption of
proposed framework, section IV consists of the the traffic flow.
experiments and the results and the section V The communication methods between the network
contains the conclusion. simulator NS-3 and the road traffic simulator SUMO
which stands for Simulation of Urban Mobility have
been studied in [9]. A coordination protocol was

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successfully built establishing a feedback loop situation often lasts for more than an hour. The
between both in order to combine the properties of delays in emergency response result in increased
SUMO and the network simulation capability of NS- death rate. The roads do not cope with the increased
3. A new protocol was designed to combine NS3 and number of vehicles and hence cause traffic
SUMO and carry out coordinated simulation for as congestions[12]. Today, the traffic problem attracts
traffic control policies as well as VANET routing the interest of researchers towards itself. There is an
protocols. To manage the communication between increased focus on this area of urban issues.
SUMO and NS-3, TraciClient was implemented. The Countries are striving to transform the existing traffic
method presented in this article can interactively system into an intelligent traffic system. The goal
model real-time scenario in VANET. behind it is to provide sustainable and intelligent
Realistic traffic scenario of Cologne, Germany forms of transportation for the citizens, ultimately
has been simulated in [10]. Different mobility avoiding the traffic congestions and making the
scenarios, a network simulator, and VANET environment green. According to [13], a total
simulator have been discussed. The main parameters number of 48,765 deaths have been reported in
used are beaconing rate, beacon size, maximum Pakistan due to accidents in the past 10 years. This is
transmission power, channel bit rate and the an alarming rate of casualties due to road accidents.
minimum signal attenuation threshold. The By improving the efficiency of the traffic system, this
simulation scenario carried out the simulation 12 number can be minimized to a significant level. If the
times starting from zero each time. At every step, response time is reduced by only a minute, it will
simulation time has been incremented by 30s up to enhance the survival rate of patients that die with a
360 seconds. Each vehicle sends 10 beacons per sudden heart attack by 24%[14]. Fig. 2 shows the
every second and all neighbors can get the beacons. year-wise reported casualties. To tackle the problem
The simulation results contain several statistics for of emergency response delays, we propose a
each vehicle including received broadcasted packets, framework that can be implemented in cities. This
lost packets, sent packets, speed, and position. The framework will fill the lack of architecture to
probability of beacon delivery for each sample implement the smart traffic solutions.
vehicle is calculated through the achieved statistics.
According to the results obtained, the probability is
different for each vehicle.

In [11], the system proposed allows drivers to

identify traffic congestion and plan their routes
according to the traffic situation, minimizing the CO2
emission and the travel time. A large amount of data
is monitored, processed and stored. In this way,
traffic congestion is detected in a precise way
through a series of algorithms. The results prove the
efficiency and accuracy of the system and its
importance in detecting traffic when the situation of
traffic congestion occurs. The algorithm’s accuracy in
detecting traffic congestion comes out to be 93.7% in
64 programmed traffic congestions, which is a highly
efficient figure. The algorithm’s accuracy in Fig 2. Reported casualties in Pakistan
detecting traffic congestion found to be 98.4%. from 2006 to 2016.
Moreover, on average 50% reduction is seen in CO2
greenhouse gas emissions, by detecting and The idea of the proposed framework is taken from
conveniently rerouting the vehicle. The average the mesh topology network in which each node is
arrival time to the destination is reduced by 70% connected with every other node and hence forming a
shorter because of the early detection of traffic mesh. Drivers are aware of their environment and
congestions and changing of the traffic routes. what’s happening around them. The road situation is
captured through sensors embedded along the
III. PROPOSED FRAMEWORK roadsides. Also, CCTV cameras capture the vehicle
To get an idea of how civilized a nation is, one information through Radio Frequency Identification
can see it by considering its traffic system. In urban tags[15]. At the top is the Traffic Controller (TC).
cities, an emergency situation is often seen getting Traffic Controller manages the whole traffic flow and
worsened due to bad road situations. Such traffic provides the required data. In an intelligent traffic

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system, communication system plays the most focus the two scenarios here. The traffic lights will
important and critical role. Supporting only a single adapt if any of these two conditions met,
type of communication system is not sufficient for ● If an emergency vehicle is reported at an
efficient communication between the nodes. The intersection then the respective traffic light will be
communication needs to be effective enough to turned green adaptively.
convey the messages in real time. The vehicles ● If an empty lane is reported at an intersection.
communicate to the traffic controller indirectly
through roadside units. This communication is The major role of inter-vehicle communication in
carried out through a Wi-Fi or a Bluetooth. The the proposed framework is to spread the notification
roadside units collect the requests, queries or any about the emergency vehicle widely. It also makes
other information provided by the vehicles and sure that there is good coordination between all the
communicate it further to the traffic controller. The vehicles on road in order to get the application of
communication technology plays an important role in new driving policies communicated by TC.
the range of wireless communication between Moreover, a crashed vehicle may utilize V2I or
different entities. This range varies depending upon (V2V+V2I) communication to notify the TC which
the distance. It can be a few meters such as Bluetooth will reroute the emergency vehicle to the best route in
and Zig-Bee etc. to the thousands of kilometers such order to avoid this bottleneck. Fig. 4 shows the data
as Wi-MAX and GSM etc. flow-chart of the proposed framework.
The data collected by the Road Side Units (RSUs)
is sent to the TC and the analysis is performed. The
TC evaluates the data and makes intelligent decisions
to offer priority based signal system for emergency
vehicles. Every emergency vehicle consists of a
unique identification number that is used to
distinguish it from rest of the vehicles. Once the
emergency vehicle passes the signal, the regular
sequence of signal execution is resumed. The
problem of traffic congestion, emergency situation
handling, waiting time of vehicles, and the road
safety will be managed optimally and in a better way.

Fig. 4: Flow chart showing the working of

Fig. 3: An intelligent traffic management system. proposed framework

If an emergency vehicle is reported at the IV. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS

intersection, then the sequence in which signals are The performance of the proposed system was
turned green is changed. When a traffic congestion is evaluated by carrying out experiments. For this
reported anywhere in the city, the TC will handle it purpose, NetBeans IDE is used and the simulation
adaptively according to the road situation. We will

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was carried out using java language. Vehicles were the waiting time for the vehicles on signal is reduced
created and assigned to four lanes of an intersection by checking the presence of vehicles in a lane. In a
randomly. Each vehicle has a unique number scenario where the signal turned green for an empty
assigned to it. It is assumed that each vehicle takes lane, vehicles in rest of the lanes keep waiting
one second to move one step forward. The model without any reason. This is the second scenario where
detects the emergency vehicle whenever it appears in an adaptive signal system is useful and hence, results
any of the lanes. It then communicates with the main in a fast and smooth traffic flow.
traffic controller. The signals are then changed
adaptively and the emergency vehicle is given V. CONCLUSION
priority. Moreover, the model also detects the density To manage the traffic in a better and efficient
of vehicles in lanes. If any of four lanes is empty, way, a framework is needed to establish an effective
then its corresponding signal is not turned green. In communication between different entities on roads.
this way, vehicles in remaining lanes cross their In this paper, an intelligent solution for the existing
respective signals faster. The experiments were run urban traffic problems was proposed. Through
five times. The results for the adaptive signal system experiments, it is proved that the waiting time for the
significantly better than a system with the non- emergency vehicle on signals is reduced to a
adaptive signal system. The waiting time of an significant point by using the adaptive signal
emergency vehicle can be reduced efficiently. The technique. The proposed solution can be used to
experiments were carried out with different vehicles solve the real world traffic problems to reduce the
ahead of the emergency vehicle in a lane. In every waiting time for signals. The increasing number of
case, changing the traffic signal adaptively gives road traffic casualties can be overcome by efficiently
efficient results. Through this technique, we can not planning the solution for it.
only control the traffic congestion on roads but also,
we can assure the road safety. Fig. 5 shows the References
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