IoT Preemption and prioritization system for emergency vehicles

Abstract

These days, vehicles are growing rapidly, and as their number grows, also traffic congestion increases. Many traffic lights are still fixed today by allowing vehicles to pass in sequence after a specified number of minutes has passed. They are also unable to differentiate vehicles such as Ambulances, fire engines, and other emergency vehicles with regular vehicles that share the same road, which means they face the same traffic congestion issues. Due to the difficulty of becoming stuck, emergency vehicles are suffering delays in their operations. Iot preemption and prioritization system for emergency vehicle is designed in order to solve these problems. This research uses Arduino Nano as a microcontroller to interact with devices and process their data before sending it to the cloud, nRF24L01+ module to communicate the availability of emergency vehicles, ultrasonic sensors to measure the traffic density, and GPS to monitor the location of traffic junctions and emergency vehicles on their path. GSM and ESP's built-in Wi-Fi Capability are used to transfer the data to the cloud, where emergency services are being able to access those data from anywhere. With usage of all the above mentioned tools, as result the traffic light can function in sequence mode, but when an emergency vehicle approaches, it can stop traffic in the other directions and open up an emergency’s direction to pass. Once the emergency vehicle has passed, the traffic light will then switch back to its normal sequence the emergency vehicle. Emergency vehicle is able to be given priority when approaching traffic junctions at least 100 meters away. The density of vehicles in congestion are measured at three different levels when the congestion is very low, medium, or high due to the distance. The collected data are analyzed to support emergency service workers in maximizing and strengthening their emergency services.