Cities saw an increased number of automobiles. That means more difficulties for emergency response vehicles in terms of road safety. Here we will see how to control the traffic system to provide good pre-hospital care.

The rise in population has increased the number of automobiles leading to a sheer growth in traffic. Life, as we know it, is precious. It is second to none and once lost cannot be brought back. During calamities and critical accidents (like road accidents), the response time taken by the emergency services plays a crucial role whether it be ambulances, fire engines or police vehicles. The major obstacle they face is traffic congestion, then road safety could be penalized.

In order to overcome that, there is a need for smart traffic control system which dynamically adapts to the changing conditions. The main concept behind this paper is to detect the ambulance en route to the destination and control the traffic system to provide effective services. This paper of the authors above proposes a system which uses a GPS module to transmit the location of the ambulance to the cloud using a Wi-Fi module, which is then transmitted to the smart traffic system which in turn changes the traffic signal cycle dynamically. This proposed low-cost system can be implemented throughout the city thereby reducing the delay and avoiding the casualties due to congested traffic situations.

Road accidents – How to overcome traffic congestion and guarantee road safety?

The vehicle traffic congestion in cities has been exponentially raised due to a large number of vehicles plying on the road. Moreover, if the emergency vehicles are stuck in a lane far from the traffic signal, the siren of the ambulance is unable to reach the traffic police, in which case the emergency vehicles have to wait until the traffic gets cleared or we have to depend on other vehicles to move aside which is not an easy task in traffic situations. In this case, road safety is difficult to guarantee.

In order to implement a traffic control system, the use of IoT (Internet of Things) technology is necessary. This system uses a SIM-28 GPS [Global Positioning System] module that has the receiver with an antenna which sends the real-time location in the form of latitudinal and longitudinal information about where the ambulance is precisely located. Therefore, a GPS tracker module is acquired to implement the in-vehicle device. Along with the GPS module integrated is the ESP8266 IoT Wi-Fi module that gives any microcontroller access to the Wi-Fi network.

Two predefined reference points are selected for all the traffic signals in the city before and after the traffic signal points. One such reference point is selected at a certain distance before the traffic control system of signals, to check whether the emergency vehicle is in the vicinity of that particular traffic signal while the other reference point is selected after the traffic control system so that the traffic signal is made to toggle back to its normal sequential cycle flow after the emergency vehicle passes it. The traffic signals are integrated with Raspberry Pi 3B+. The traffic signals are programmed to change dynamically as the emergency vehicle passes the reference point.

 

A traffic control system to avoid road accidents: which is the advantage of emergency services?

In order to improve road safety, they thought about a system to detect road accidents automatically using a vibration sensor. With this method, the ambulance unit can send vital parameters of the patient to the hospital. This will help to save the life of the accident victim (Accident Detection & Ambulance Rescue System Using Wireless Technology [3]).

In the paper Ambulance Assistance for Emergency Services Using GPS Navigation [4], they proposed a system which is used by the hospitals to track down their ambulances. The main aim of the project is to reduce the deaths of critical victims by making sure that they reach the hospital in time for proper treatment.

The GPS technology is essential for road safety improvements. It is used so that the hospital can take quick action which might reduce the extremity. This system is more appropriate and the main advantage is that there is a significant reduction in time consumption. In the paper Accident Detection and Ambulance Rescue using Raspberry Pi [5], they proposed a system which finds the quickest path by controlling traffic light signals in favour of an emergency medical vehicle.

By this new system, the time delay is reduced by applying the RF technology that controls the traffic signals. The preference of service to the emergency medical vehicle follows the queuing technology through server communication. This makes sure of the reduced time delay between the accident spot and the hospital.

In the paper Smart ambulance guidance system[6], they propose a system that uses a central server to control the traffic controllers. The traffic signal controller is implemented using Arduino UNO. The ambulance driver uses a web application to request the traffic controller to make the signal green in which the ambulance is present. A low-cost system which can be implemented throughout the city thereby reducing the number of deaths due to traffic situations has been aimed at.

Road accidents and safety: Ambulance Assistance for Emergency Services Using GPS Navigation – File storage

This model would allow an expansive pool of resources such as storage, network, computing power and software to be allocated on-demand. The resources are extracted and delivered as a service over the Internet anywhere, anytime. Thus, the GPS location data forwarded from the GPS device by the Wi-Fi module is stored in the cloud infrastructure.

Operation of the traffic lights

Raspberry pi of any model with GPO will work for controlling the traffic lights. We use a set of three LED s which serve as the substitute for the traffic lights and a HDMI display to show the output from the Pi. Here, the three traffic lights being red, amber and green LEDs are connected to the Pi using four pins. One of these needs to be grounded; the other three being actual GPIO pins are used to control each of the individual LEDs.

After the Raspberry Pi 3B+ is installed with the raspbian pi Operating system, the traffic lights are programmed to work via Python programming language. Once the ambulance crosses the first predefined reference point which is situated 300 meters before the traffic signal system, a message programs the green LED light to turn on, so as to clear the traffic by making way to the emergency vehicle and at the same time red light is displayed at all the remaining directions of the traffic point to make sure that there is proper signalling for the automobiles entering the traffic section.

Once the emergency ambulance vehicle crosses the second reference point which is situated after a certain distance of another 50 meters post the traffic signal system, the traffic lights are programmed to return to the default traffic signal cycle thereby efficiently controlling the traffic system.

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Ambulance Detection and Traffic Control System – road safety project Karthik B V1, Manoj M2, Rohit R Kowshik3, Akash Aithal4, Dr. S. Kuzhalvai Mozhi5 1,2,3,4 Eighth Semester, Dept. of ISE, The National Institute of Engineering, Mysore 5Associate Professor, Dept. of ISE, The National Institute of Engineering, Mysore

 

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REFERENCES
1) Dian-liang Xiao, Yu-jia Tian. Reliability of Emergency Rescue System on Highway, IEEE, 2009.
2) Rajesh Kannan Megalingam. Ramesh Nammily Nair, Sai Manoj Prakhya. Wireless Vehicular Accident Detection and Reporting System, IEEE, 2010.
3) Pooja Dagade, Priyanka Salunke, Supriya Salunke, Seema T. PatiL, Nutan Maharashtra Institute of Engineering and Technology. Accident Detection & Ambulance Rescue System Using Wireless, IJRET, 2017
4) Shantanu Sarkar, School of Computer Science, VIT University, Vellore. Ambulance Assistance for Emergency Services Using GPS Navigation, IJRET, 2016.
5) Kavya K, Dr Geetha C R, Dept. of E&C, Sapthagiri College of Engineering. Accident Detection and Ambulance Rescue using Raspberry Pi, IJET, 2016.
6) Mr Bhushan Anant Ramani, Prof. Amutha Jeyakumar, VJTI Mumbai. Smart Ambulance Guidance System, International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, 2018.
7) R. Sivakumar, G. Vignesh, Vishal Narayanan, Anna University, Tamil Nadu. Automated traffic light control system and stolen vehicle detection. IEEE, 2018.
8) Tejas Thaker, GTU PG School, Gandhinagar.ESP8266 based implementation of wireless sensor network with Linux based web-server. IEEE, 2016.
9) Mr Nerella Ome, Master of Engineering, Assistant Professor, GRIET, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. Internet of Things (IoT) based Sensors to Cloud system using ESP8266 and Arduino Due, IJARCCE, 2016.
10) Niyati Parameswaran, Bharathi Muthu, Madiajagan Muthaiyan, World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology. Qmulus – A Cloud Driven GPS Based Tracking System for Real-Time Traffic Routing, International Journal of Computer and Information Engineering, 2013.
11) Saradha, B. Janani, G. Vijayshri, and T. Subha. Intelligent traffic signal control system for ambulance using RFID and cloud. Computing and Communications Technologies (ICCCT), 2017, 2nd International Conference on. IEEE, 2017.
12) Madhav Mishra, Seema Singh, Dr Jayalekshmi K.R, Dr Taskeen Nadkar. Advance Alert for Ambulance Pass by using IOT for Smart City, International Journal of Engineering Science and Computing, June 2017.

 

BIOGRAPHIES
Karthik B V is currently pursuing his B.E degree in the Department of Information Science & Engineering, Mysuru. His B.E major project area is IoT. This paper is survey paper of his B.E project.
Manoj M is currently pursuing his B.E degree in the Department of Information Science & Engineering, Mysuru. His B.E major project area is IoT. This paper is survey paper of his B.E project.
Rohit R Kowshik is currently pursuing his B.E degree in the Department of Information Science & Engineering, Mysuru. His B.E major project area is IoT. This paper is survey paper of his B.E project.
Akash Aithal is currently pursuing his B.E degree in the Department of Information Science & Engineering, Mysuru. His B.E major project area is IoT. This paper is survey paper of his B.E project.
Dr.S. Kuzhalvai Mozhi is Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science & Engineering. She has received her Ph.D.from VTU, Belagavi , M.E. from PSG, Coimbatore and B.E. from Trichy. Her teaching and research interests are in the field of Cryptography and Compiler.