International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE)

ISSN: 2277-3878, Volume-8 Issue-3, September 2019

 Advanced Traffic Signal Control System for

Emergency Vehicles
Sangamesh S B, Sanjay D H, Meghana S, M N Thippeswamy

Abstract: This paper introduces the novel approach to handle Existing solutions requires the attention of the people where
the situation for emergency vehicles like ambulance and fire they should coordinate and help emergency vehicles pass
trucks to avoid traffic to reach the destination in time in order to through, this paper proposes the system that is necessary to
save the lives. This system architecture is based on Internet-of- implement to avoid such disasters. The situation today has
Things (IoT) using cloud at its center. The proposed system uses
led to many deaths and losses due to increased population
real-time GPS to track the location of the vehicle and update the
same to cloud , smart traffic signals which are in present in the increased number of vehicles. The image processing
route of the vehicle are notified the same. system maintains the method for vehicle tracking works good during free flow of
details on the emergency vehicles to pass through the traffic with the traffic but they have difficulties with congestion,
no or minimum waiting time, thus reducing the number of shadows and lighting transitions [2].
deaths during the travel to hospital and conditions to reduce the Therefore, we developed a system in order to improve the
loss of property in case of fire emergency. conditions for those vehicles so that they can reach the
Keywords : Cloud, Internet-of-things, GPS, Android APP. hospital soon or in case of fire brigade to reach the affected
area as fast as possible. This could result in minimizing the
I. INTRODUCTION deaths due to traffic and loss of properties in emergency
In the growing technical era the traffic in every city has been situations.
increases at a greater extent, sometimes it is even
uncontrollable. This condition has a definite effect over the A. RELATED WORK
daily life and other activities of the society. When it is the The work done in [3] used health monitoring system in
matter of safety over the roads and the emergency situations ambulance, parameters like ECG, Heart Rate and Body
like fire and health, high traffic causes a danger to the people Temperature are monitored For ECG measurement, a 2 -lead
[1]. It is even difficult to allot a special lane for emergency Electrode Electrocardiogram technique is used Heart Rate
vehicles [2]. The existing solutions face many problems. To measurement is done using photo plethysmography method.
ease the moments of these vehicles we have come up with LM-35 is used to measure the patient’s body temperature.
the solution of “Advanced Traffic Signal Control System”. Then pc in ambulance is used to send the data to hospital
The reason behind this work is to provide smooth and fast and to control the traffic signal.
flow for emergency vehicles to reach the destination in time, A system consists of an android application which helps in
thus by decreasing the number of causalities. The cloud registering the ambulance to the network is proposed in [4].
helps the driver of the emergency vehicle reach the The android application sends an emergency instruction to
destination in time by providing proper route with traffic server and the direction which it travels with GPS
synchronous traffic lights at every signal in the way.in this when the ambulance has stopped due to traffic. The nearest
paper we consider ambulance as our emergency vehicle. is identified based upon GPS. If it nears then signal is made
A survey said that 90% of heart patient can be treated if they green so that it passes through, then original flow is restored.
reach in time, without any traffic congestion. It is one of the The authors proposed a system where it is implemented by
major problems of current growing world where people using ARDUINO, RFID reader for detecting RFID tag
always prefer a comfort way of transportation buying a car which is placed in ambulance [5]. The system updates to
or bike thus increasing the congestion it may even get worse traffic system through RF transmitter and receiver if reader
in the future. detects the emergency vehicle. Then traffic system controls
the traffic lights accordingly. IR sensors are placed which
helps in estimating the congestion, the same information is
Manuscript published on 30 September 2019
* Correspondence Author provided to emergency vehicle driver using GSM.
Sangamesh S B*, Department of CSE, Nitte Meenakshi Institute of The work done in [6] proposed an approach where it
Technology, Bangalore-64 measures distance between ambulance and intersection by
Sanjay D H, Department of CSE, Nitte Meenakshi Institute of some visual sensing methods. Emergency vehicle counting
Technology, Bangalore-64
and time alert the traffic network. The distance measured is
Meghana S, Department of CSE, Nitte Meenakshi Institute of
Technology, Bangalore-64 calculated for comparison using Euclidean distance,
M N Thippeswamy, Department of CSE, Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Manhattan distance and other techniques, And Arduino to
Technology, Bangalore-64 control the traffic lights. In [7] a system is proposed where it
detects the accident and reports the location of accident to
© The Authors. Published by Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and
Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the
the nearest ambulance, so that there are no or minimum
CC-BY-NC-ND license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ causalities.

Retrieval Number C4323098219/19©BEIESP

DOI: 10.35940/ijrte.C4323.098319 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
1242 & Sciences Publication
 Advanced Traffic Signal Control System for Emergency Vehicles

In this system ambulance driver has power to control the The driver will provide the details of the situation once he
traffic, when the ambulance is carrying injured or critical reaches the accident spot or the fire spot. The details will be
patient’s driver can make the traffic green. The same recorded to the google cloud service (firebase). The
direction is provided by GSM technology which intern uses application is developed with the GPS service to track the
the internet to get latitude and longitude. The authors in [8] staffs of the emergency vehicle. The staffs are provided with
proposed a system which determines the optimal path by a username and the password by the service agencies. The
readings provided by sensors, it is done by modulating it repetition of the authentication will result in unsuccessful
into two parts data center and ambulance. The data center
way of accessing the route map from the cloud service. Once
collects the data like current location of patient and hospital.
the data has been stored in the cloud storage, it will be
As well as the location of ambulance. Crowd sensors
analyzed by the machine learning algorithms to decide the
readings are fixed on roads.
All this helps finding the optimal path where patient can be level of emergency and the situation.
safely brought to the hospitals. The system is included with various sensors, Wi-Fi modules
and other systems to know clearly about the situation and the
B. CONTRIBUTIONS
way need to be cleared and the required time. Hence the
With the aim of improving the traffic situations and the traffic is maintained. The cloud system will return a shortest
making an easy way for the emergency vehicles, a system is and less traffic map to the driver of the emergency vehicle
developed using IoT and cloud. An easy authentication for through the android app integration. Once driver receives the
the staff of the emergency vehicles is proposed. The details map for the nearest hospital or the fire control center he
of the situation and the destination are recorded. This helps
starts travelling. The route map shows the traffic signals to
to provide non-stop or minimal travel path to the nearest
clear and the internal integration helps the driver to move the
safety point. For every minute, the GPS co-ordinates to
vehicles without stopping and to reach the destination at
track the vehicle are recorded. These details are shared to
the drivers when they requested. This provides a faster way faster rate with less time.
to clear the traffic jams in some of the junctions. B. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
II. PROPOSED WORK The Figure 2 shows the system architecture is shown with
the components of the system.
A. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
The model developed as shown in the Figure 1 is a
combination of various applications of the technologies like
machine learning, cloud service, android app and the IoT
devices and the sensors. The model is not portable as the IoT
devices are set near the traffic signals and the android
application is provided to the emergency vehicle drivers.

FIGURE 2: System Architecture.

FIGURE 1: System Overview of the model.

Retrieval Number C4323098219/19©BEIESP

Published By:
DOI: 10.35940/ijrte.C4323.098319
Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org
1243 & Sciences Publication
 International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE)
ISSN: 2277-3878, Volume-8 Issue-3, September 2019

FIGURE 4: An example of the route

 Emergency Vehicle Crew and App: Staff of
Emergency vehicle must decide the level of Emergency
based on the condition of patient or the situation, Driver FIGURE 3: Operation of the system
must know the working of application provided to him, he
must also be aware of local routes. Crew members must be
able treat the patients with first aid. The app updates the IV. IMPLEMENTAION AND WORKING OF
GPS coordinates for every interval of a minute, making it SYSTEM
easier to track the location of Emergency vehicle.
This work focuses on reducing rather eliminating the waiting
 Cloud: It acts as the center of this architecture. It receives time of emergency vehicles near the traffic signal. The
destination, Level of emergency and GPS coordinates from Figure 4 shows the example of route decided after analyzing
the Driver app for every interval of a minute. Then decides the emergency by the system.
to send the instructions to all the microcontrollers which This system is fully automated and running always.
resides in the route to destination.
 Driver asked to enter the destination and level of
 Microcontroller: It gets the instructions from cloud criticality.
system. It handles the traffic when there are multiple
 Data is sent to cloud.
Emergency vehicles waiting.
 Central cloud analyses the source to destination map
and forwards the data to the signal controllers on the
 Traffic signal: These are the traffic controlling units,
way it also verifies the level of criticality
which directs and instructs the vehicles to move or wait.
 Signal controllers are raspberry pi which controls the
They operate on instructions provided by micro controller
traffic lights, they know the status of emergency vehicle
beforehand. Thus, helping them pass the lane early.
III. ALGORITHM
 If there are multiple emergency vehicles coming in
In this subsection, an algorithm (refer to Figure 3) is as shown in the Figure 5 lane then decision is made
designed to describe the operation of the system is based on level of criticality
presented. On start of the system the driver will use the  Level of criticality:
android app provided and updates the details to the Cloud  There are the numbers in range of (1,10) which
system (firebase) and also provides the GPS co-ordinates at helps in describing the level of emergency of the
regular interval of time. This information is transferred to situations
the Raspberry Pi installed to handle the traffic signal. On  Sensors (heart rate, blood pressure, temperature)
examining the details of the driver the traffic signals are placed in the ambulance, this data can be used to
given instructions to change or alter the signals at the verify the criticality In case of fire accidents the
junction. The crowd is cleared using speakers which are photos can be used to verify the criticality.
guided again by the Raspberry Pi. After this the Cloud
system (firebase) will return a map to the android app based
on the status provided by the microcontroller. There is loop
between the app and the firebase. The Cloud system
(firebase) acts like a bridge between the traffic handling
system and application at the driver. This handles entry and
use from multiple drivers

Retrieval Number C4323098219/19©BEIESP

DOI: 10.35940/ijrte.C4323.098319 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
1244 & Sciences Publication
 Advanced Traffic Signal Control System for Emergency Vehicles

FIGURE 6: Login via android app

This is the android application provided by the hospital or

FIGURE 5: Multiple instances running at a time.
the fire brigade for the vehicle drivers. In this work, the
results are shown for the hospital (Figure 8). They will be
V. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
given the username and the password to sign into the
In this work, the results are shown for the hospital firebase. On pressing the login button the username will be
emergencies. The proposed system can also be used in other entered in the firebase. If he/she tries to login again after
emergency agencies. The Figure 6 shows the hardware design successful login he/she will not be taken to next pages for
of the traffic signal. detail entering.

FIGURE 8: Hardware simulation of the traffic signal. FIGURE 7: Details entering through the app by emergency
vehicle driver
This is the page after the user successfully logged in. Here
The representation of the data sent by the user through the the driver has to enter the source from where the emergency
android app is shown in Figure 7 in the database of the cloud vehicle is starting and the destination that is hospital or the
service that is google firebase. First attribute shows the fire spot. The level of emergency is been provided in the
source and later comes other details with the attribute name dropdown field. We can see the username in the page. On
like destination and level represents the level of emergency. clicking the submit button he will get a popup message
‘Str’ is the username of the driver of the vehicle. saying the destination added. He/She cannot leave any of the
fields empty here.

VI. CONCLUSION
This paper has proposed a solution to existing solution by
implementing center cloud which makes decision based on
the real-time GPS coordinates and level of criticality of the
situation.

Retrieval Number C4323098219/19©BEIESP

Published By:
DOI: 10.35940/ijrte.C4323.098319
Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org
1245 & Sciences Publication
 International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE)
ISSN: 2277-3878, Volume-8 Issue-3, September 2019

Using smart micro-controller at traffic signals with vehicle

status helps make a decision which can save lives

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AUTHORS PROFILE

Sangamesh S B is a Application Developer at IBM,

Bangalore and is involved in IoT, Machine Learning,
Development for autonomous driving application. he has
obtained his BE in CSE from Nitte Meenakshi Institute
of Technology-Bangalore in 2019.

Sanjay D H obtained his B.E,Computer Science and

Engineering from Nitte Meenkashi Institute of
Technology in 2019. His areas of Interest are Machine
Learning and IoT.

Meghan S is a Associate software engineer at

ROBORT-BOSCH, BANGALORE and SHE is
involved in Security concepts in CLOUD
COMPUTING. She has obtained her BE in CSE from
Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology-Bangalore
in 2019.
hor-3
Photo
Dr. M.N. Thippeswamy, currently working as
Professor & HoD of CS&E, NMIT, Bangalore. He
holds a BEng degree in Computer Science and
Engineering from Kuvempu University, India,
M.Tech degree in Computer Science and
Engineering from VTU, India and PhD in
Engineering from School of Engineering
(Electrical, Electronic and Computer
Engineering), Howard college campus, University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Durban, South Africa.
He has spent more than 20 years of time in research and development,
teaching and administration at well-known universities and engineering
institutions in India and Africa.
He is currently focused on Internet of Things, BigData Analytics, Wireless
Ad Hoc & Sensor Networks and Cognitive Radio with emphasis on design
and analysis of MAC and Routing protocols.

Retrieval Number C4323098219/19©BEIESP

DOI: 10.35940/ijrte.C4323.098319 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
1246 & Sciences Publication