Software-defined Control of Emergency Vehicles in Smart Cities

Abstract

One of the most fundamental challenges in nowadays transportation systems is the appropriate management of emergencies resulting from accidents. The purpose of this paper is to utilize vehicular communication technologies and integrate them with the software defined idea to reduce the time required by the emergency vehicle to arrive at the accident scene from the emergency center (i.e., rescue time). In this context, one of the main approaches is traffic light preemption in favor of emergency vehicles: the timing of traffic lights along the rescue route is dynamically adjusted to minimize the number of RED lights met by the emergency vehicles. Most of existing methods of preemption are based on local decision making at each individual traffic light. However, in this paper, the use of a central controller for traffic light scheduling leads to higher efficiency due to the higher knowledge of street traffic and intersection conditions. The proposed method is evaluated using the OMNET++ and SUMO tools over part of the city of Tabriz, Iran. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the average rescue time even by more than 50% in some cases.