IOT based Traffic Signal control for reducing time
delay of an Emergency Vehicle using GPS
Sayalee Deshmukh
Department of Computer Engineering .
Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Engineering for Women,
Pune, India
sayalee.deshmukh@rediffmail.com
Abstract—Now a- days the situation of Traffic is getting
intense day by day. The traffic is major factor which
contributes to the delay in reaching destination. This delay can
be a matter of life and death in case of emergency vehicles like
Ambulance, Fire Brigade etc. This paper proposes an
approach which controls the Traffic Signals so that when the
emergency vehicle is on its way to a particular destination. The
location of vehicle is tracked by using GPS. This location is
send to the application. The application performs the
algorithm with the help of this data and the google map.
It controls the signals on its path. We also introduced a new
blue light to traffic signal to avoid the chaos in the mind of the
people waiting at the traffic signal.
Keywords—traffic, delay, GPS, signal, IoT, Ambulance,
emergency vehicle.
I. INTRODUCTION
Human Life is a very valuable thing for any country.
Accidents and Medical emergencies like fire, road accidents,
medical emergencies etc. are normal occurring’s. It is very
important that the emergency vehicles reach the spot in time
to avoid critical human loss. Thus, hospitals and fire stations
are throughout the city to reduce response time in case of
such emergencies. A very fast growth in population in cities
has resulted in very huge traffic on roads within the city. [1].
Conventionally, the traffic give way to such emergency
vehicles, on hearing the vehicle’s siren. However, this is not
sufficient in situations where the traffic cannot give path to
emergency vehicles at the traffic signals, which is the major
reason for delay. Almost all the traffic signals today are
automated, when an emergency vehicle passes by an
intersection without green signal is a danger to traffic which
is approaching the signal from other roads for which the
signal is green. Thus to avoid major accidents the
emergency vehicle has to wait until the entire traffic signal
cycle to complete and gets an official green signal. This is an
important reason for the delay in response time of emergency
vehicle. Other means emergency vehicle transport like air
ambulances are very expensive and are not reasonable for
small cities [1].
Thus, Traffic Signal Preemption has become the need of
the hour, in large cities where traffic situations is a major
reason for delay. A successful Traffic signal Preemption will
helps to reduce the delay and increasing response time which
may be very helpful in saving a large amount of human lives
and will also provide road safety to other traffic with
minimum cost.
978-1-5386-5257-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
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Dr. S.B.Vanjale
Department of Computer Engineering .
Bharati Vidyapeeth University College of Engineering
Pune, India
sbvanjale@bvcoep.edu.in
II. PROPOSED SYSTEM
The current ways used to faster the mobility of
emergency vehicle are techniques like siren, blinking lights
and some advanced techniques like RFID tags, etc. even after
using this technique the problem is not yet solved. In the
proposed system we are making the use of GPS system IOT
application and Android application. Using this all together
and handling the traffic situation in such a way that the
emergency vehicle passes without any delay at the traffic
Signal. The details of this system are given below.
A. GPS System
The GPS system which is used for tracking the location
of the Android Device is used to track the location of the
emergency vehicle. The GPS system also provides with the
best Route to reach the destination. The latest feature of the
system which shows the traffic on the road and the delay that
may be caused due to it.
The driver will enter the destination in the Google Maps,
this will return him with all the path options, along with
approximate time according to the traffic situation. The
driver then selects one of the best paths.
B. Android Application
Android is a software for mobile devices that includes an
operating system, middleware and key applications. A
developer can build an extremely innovative and rich
application by using an android open development platform.
Developers have complete access to the framework APIs
used by the core applications. The architecture is designed
to simplify the reuse of components. All the applications
have the rights to make the use of the capabilities of other
applications. This same mechanism allows components to
be replaced by the user. The Android SDK provides the
complete API package for the Android platform [2].
GPS is a satellite-based navigation system that provides
location and time information in all weather conditions and
anywhere on the earth, this location is opted only for the
points where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or
more GPS satellites. Satellites time is accurate since it uses
an inbuilt atomic clock which is of high-precision. At any
given time, a GPS receiver gets the information about the
position of a given satellite. By calculating the timing of
how long it takes for a signal to traverse through the
distance between the satellite and the receiver, the precise
location of the receiver can be computed.
The actual 3D position is tracked by the mapping of
latitude, longitude and altitude which is send by three
different satellite. A fourth satellite is used to improve
accuracy and correct errors in timing offsets between the
clock in the satellite and that in the receiver. The more
satellites there are, the greater the accuracy is
Android provides four different types of classes to help
developers to make use of inbuilt GPS receivers in the smart
phones.
They are:
• Location Manager
• Location Provider
• Geocoding.
• Google Maps.
The proposed model will use an android application which
will be used on a smart phone or tablet installed in every
ambulance. The app will use the Location Manager, and
Location Provider to perform the following functions:
• The app can only be accessed using a secure login.
• The staff of the emergency vehicle can then select a
destination using Google Maps.
• The shortest path to the destination will be displayed.
• The staff can select a priority level and request an
emergency status.
• Once the vehicle is declared as an emergency vehicle, the
app will send regular updates to the server, which consists
of the geo-coordinates of the vehicle, obtained using GPS
Location Manager.
C. Application Server
The Server plays the very vital role in this system. It accepts
the location of the Ambulance or any Emergency Vehicle
from the GPS of the Android User. The server sends the
message to the next traffic signal in the vicinity of the
ambulance. All the signals are controlled by Raspberry Pi.
Whenever two emergency vehicles of same emergency
arrive at same traffic signal at this time. The vehicle with
highest priority is given the preference.
D. Microcotroller (Raspberry Pi / Aduino)
Raspberry Pi is a microcontroller
Fig.1. Raspberry Pi
A Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized micro-computer
which was originally designed for knowledge purpose, it was
inspired by the 1981 BBC Micro. The Raspberry Pi is an
open hardware device, it has an exception of the primary
chip which is on the Raspberry Pi. This chip is called as SoC
the Broadcomm SoC (System on a Chip). this chip is
responsible for running of various components on Raspberry
Pi board such as CPU, graphics, memory, the USB
controller, etc.
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III. WORKING
The working of the system is based on two important
modules.
• The GPS System
• Application Server
The Ambulance or any Emergency Vehicle must be
equipped with the GPS System. This GPS System will send
the coordinates of the vehicle at every moment to the
Application Server. Each vehicle must be logged in to the
Android application. This application keeps the track vehicle
and tracks the route. The route is already selected by the
driver this route is also accessed by the Server.
The Application server accepts all the information, based
on this information the server finds the current location of
the vehicle and the route selected to the destination. This
helps to find the next traffic signal in its vicinity. Whenever
the vehicle comes in the distance of certain meters from the
signal the server has to send the required action so that the
vehicle does not have to wait at the signal.
A signal is also send to the destination hospital so that the
hospital authorities are ready to handle the patient. Hospitals
also assign the priority to the patient based on their situation.
It is useful when two ambulances arrive to the same signal at
same time. Whose chances are very rare.
There could be certain decisions that the software needs
to take based on the situation of the signal lights. Some of
those possibilities are as follows
• If the signal is already green it will remain the same
as long as the Ambulance does not pass by. There is also a
threat that people might think that it is technical error if it is
green for too long only on one track and may break the rule
to avoid this a new blue light is placed on the signal,
whenever other signals be Red to give way to emergency
vehicle simultaneously the Blue light is lit as an indication
that there is an emergency vehicle passing by [3].
Fig. 2. Diagrammatic representation of the system
 • Second Situation is when the signal is Red. In this
case whenever the ambulance reaches within the certain
range of the signal the Application will turn the signal on the
route of vehicle into green and the one which is green into
yellow and after the time duration into red along with blue,
the remaining sides which are already red will also get Blue
as an indication whenever the vehicle passes by, the blue
light is turned off and the signal continues into its normal
routine
• Third situation is when the signal has turned Yellow
and is about to get Red, in this case also the signal is
turned into green and all the rest are turned to red in
proper cycle
• When two emergency vehicles reach the same
signal at the same time, to resolve such situation the priority
that is assigned to its patient is used as the deciding factor.
Patient with higher priority gets the way first.

IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper the proposed system is very efficient as it
makes the use of data send by location provider which is
almost very efficient. The android application not only
focuses on traffic light controlling but also sends message to
the hospital and the concerned doctor so that the
arrangements are ready at the hospital. The hospital will
assign priorities to the patient, to assign priority the
information is to be given by the staff with the ambulance
The chaos that may be created by changing lights
among the minds of people waiting at the signal will be
taken care by the concept of Blue light which is an
indication that the signals are changed.
This paper improves the state of the art in emergency
vehicle routing by introducing dynamic path planning
combined with traffic light preemption. As our results
demonstrate, dynamic path planning has proven to reduce
the emergency vehicle’s travel time

REFERENCES
[1] Sahar Z Shatnawi, Balqees A Mohammad , Alaa I Kalaf and Hussein
R Al-zoubi. A Wireless MobilePhone Approach to Traffic Signal
Preemption for Faster Service of Emergency Vehicles. International
Journal of Computer Applications 46(3):35-41, May 2012. Published
by Foundation of Computer Science, New York, USA.
[2] Android Developers http://developer.android.com

[3] Mr.M. Nithyakumar and P. Aswin, “Traffic Clearance For

Emergency Vehicles Using Priority Mode,” International Research
Journal of Engineering and Technology, Volume: 04 Issue: 03 | Mar -
2017.
[4] Hend Kamal Gedawy, “Dynamic Path Planning and Traffic Light
Coordination for Emergency Vehicle Routing,”
[5] Farheen Taj, “Traffic Clearance System for Ambulance Services,”
Recent Advances in Technology and Engineering (RATE-2017).

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