Coalition Game for Emergency Vehicles Re-Routing in Smart Cities

Abstract

Traffic jam is considered as a difficult problem to deal with in many cities around the world due to the continuously increasing number of vehicles compared to the available infrastructure. Traffic congestion significantly influences drivers travel journey, fuel consumption and air pollution. However, the most important factor has affected the delay of emergency vehicles, such as ambulances and police cars, leading to increased road deaths and significant financial losses. To reduce this problem, we propose an advanced traffic control allows rapid emergency services response in smart cities. This can be achieved through a traffic management system capable of implementing path planning in road network monitoring and driving the emergency vehicle in the best possible way to reach the hazard zone. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with two other algorithms over Birmingham city centre test scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves traffic efficiency of emergency vehicles by an overall average of 21.78%, 29.32%, 32.79% and 46.77% in terms of travel time, fuel consumption, CO 2 emission and average speed, respectively.