Dynamic Traffic Light System to Reduce The Waiting Time of Emergency Vehicles at Intersections within IoT Environment

Abstract

Traditional traffic light system, which works based on fixed cycle can be a main reason for traffic jam, due to lack of adaptation to road conditions. Traffic jam has a bad impact on drivers and road users due to the time delay it causes for road users to reach their destinations. This delay can cause a life threat in case of emergency vehicles, such as ambulance vehicles and police cars. One key solution to solve traffic jam on intersections is the dynamic traffic lights, where traffic light operation adapts based on the intersection traffic conditions. Since few of researches projects in the literature interested in solving traffic jam problem for emergency vehicles, the contribution of this paper is to introduces a novel approach to operate traffic light system. The new approach consists of two algorithms which are pure operation mode and hybrid operation mode. These operation modes aim to reduce the waiting time of emergency vehicles on traffic intersections. They assume that there is a smart infrastructure system uses Internet of Things (IoT) that can detect emergency vehicles arrival to an intersection. The smart infrastructure system switches traffic light operation from fixed cycle mode to dynamic mode. The dynamic mode manages traffic lights at intersections to reduce the waiting time of emergency vehicles. The paper presents a simulation of the proposed algorithms, highlights their advantages. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the new technique, we compared our approach with Wen algorithm in the literature and the Traditional traffic light system. Our evaluation study indicated that the proposed algorithms outperformed Wen technique and the Traditional system under different traffic scenarios