A mobile agent based autonomous partial green corridor discovery and maintenance mechanism for emergency services amidst urban traffic

Traffic management in urban areas is a challenging task. Provisioning of traffic moving on the roads becomes crucial especially when emergency services such as an ambulance or fire-fighting team need to make their way to the hospital or to the point where the problem is. With the advent of networking technologies, the traffic signals can now be equipped with sensing and communicating equipment facilitating the diversion of such vehicles along shorter and less crowded paths towards their respective destinations. This paper exploits the concept of an Internet of Things comprising the various traffic signaling equipments, and proposes a distributed mobile agent based mechanism to autonomously discover, create and manage a partial green corridor just ahead of the emergency vehicle along the least crowded path to its destination. The proposed mechanism assumes a network of equipment used for traffic signaling as its base and makes use of intelligent mobile software agents to facilitate the smooth movement of an emergency service vehicle. We have implemented the proposed mechanism by emulating the network of traffic signals and mobile agents using a mobile agent platform. The movement of the ambulance and the traffic flowing on the roads has been at the moment simulated. Our implementation and results obtained emphasize that the proposed mechanism can prove to be a viable solution for the movement of emergency vehicles in urban traffic.