A Novel Approach to Reduce Traffic Chaos in Emergency and Evacuation Scenarios

This paper proposes a novel chaos reducing information dissemination approach for spatio-temporal traffic information related to first responders and evacuation scenarios using Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs). In the authors' approach, they provide an emergency vehicle path clearing technique. Therefore, traffic confusion and chaos is lowered on evacuation and emergency vehicle routes. Simulation results show that their approach works efficiently without fully relying on any message relaying infrastructure. One of the major causes of traffic chaos is the confusion and failure to detect Emergency Service Vehicles (ESVs) (e.g. ambulances, police cars and fire trucks, etc.), which can lead to slow progress and even accidents involving the ESVs traveling towards their destinations.