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Mapping and just-in-time traffic congestion mitigation for emergency vehicles in smart cities

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Abstract

Traffic congestion in urban areas poses several challenges to municipal authorities including pollution, productivity loss, reckless driving, and delays in dealing with emergencies. Smart cities can use modern IoT infrastructure to solve the congestion problem and reduce pollution and delays. In this article, we focus on congestion mapping and mitigation for emergency vehicles in smart cities. We use a novel traffic light control technique to change the flow of cars on lights of interest thereby making way for emergency vehicles. We use a simulation model for a selected area of Manhattan to implement congestion mapping and to help find the fastest path for routing emergency vehicles based on the congestion metrics. The system controls traffic lights to block off the roads feeding into congestion and allows flow away from the congested path. This helps in clearing the preferred route to help emergency vehicles reach the destination faster. We show that the proposed algorithm can map congestion on city roads with accuracy thus helping to improve the response time of the emergency services and saving precious lives.

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Data availability

The data-sets used in this work are available at https://www.dot.ny.gov/tdv

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Author notes

  1. Junaid A. Zubairi and Sahar Idwan have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, State University of New York at Fredonia, 280 Central Ave., Fredonia, 14063, NY, USA

    Syed Ali Haider & Junaid A. Zubairi

  2. Department of Computer Science and Applications, Faculty of Prince Al-Hussein bin Abdullah II for Information Technology, The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan

    Sahar Idwan

Authors
  1. Syed Ali Haider
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  2. Junaid A. Zubairi
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Contributions

S.H. wrote the main manuscript text including methodology and results. S.H. collected the data, wrote the simulations and developed the algorithm and model presented in the paper. J.Z. contributed to the abstract, introduction and conclusion sections. S.I. contributed the literature review, literature review write-up and discussions on current state-of-the-art. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Syed Ali Haider.

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Haider, S.A., Zubairi, J.A. & Idwan, S. Mapping and just-in-time traffic congestion mitigation for emergency vehicles in smart cities. Computing (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-024-01345-3

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