Adaptive traffic management for secure and efficient emergency services in smart cities

Rapid increase in number of vehicles on the roads as well as growing size of cities have led to a plethora of challenges for road traffic management authorities such as traffic congestion, accidents and air pollution. The work presented in this paper focuses on the particular problem of traffic management for emergency services, for which a delay of few minutes may cause human lives risks as well as financial losses. The goal is to reduce the latency of emergency services for vehicles such as ambulances and police cars, with minimum unnecessary disruption to the regular traffic, and preventing potential misuses. To this end, we propose to design a framework in which the Traffic Management System (TMS) may adapt by dynamically adjusting traffic lights, changing related driving policies, recommending behavior change to drivers, and applying essential security controls. The choice of an adaptation depends on the emergency severity level announced by the emergency vehicle(s). The severity level may need to be verified by corresponding authorities to preserve security measures. We discuss the details of our proposed framework and the potential challenges in the paper.