REDUCING THE TIME TO GET EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE FOR ACCIDENT VEHICLES ON THE ROAD THROUGH AN INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

Abstract. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is one of the main components of a smart city. ITS have several purposes including the increase of the safety and comfort of the passengers and the reduction of the road accidents. ITS can enhance safety in three modes before, within and after the collision by preventing accident via assistive system, sensing the collision situation and calculating the time of the collision and providing the emergency response in a timely manner. The main objective of this paper is related to the smart transportation services which can be provided at the time of the collision and after the accident. After the accident, it takes several minutes to hours for the person to contact the emergency department. If an accident takes place for a vehicle in a remote area, this time increases and that may cause the loss of life. In addition, determination of the exact location of the accident is difficult by the emergency centres. That leads to the possibility of erroneous responder act in dispatching the rescue team from the nearest hospital. A new assistive intelligent system is designed in this regard that includes both software and hardware units. Hardware unit is used as an On-Board Unit (OBU), which consists of GPS, GPRS and gyroscope modules. Once OBU detects the accident, a notification system designed and connected to OBU will sent an alarm to the server. The distance to the nearest emergency center is calculated using Dijkstra algorithm. Then the server sends a request for assistance to the nearest emergency centre. The proposed system is developed and tested at local laboratory conditions. The results show that this system can reduce Ambulance Arrival Time (AAT). The preliminary results and architecture of the system have been presented. The inclination angle determined by the proposed system along with the car position identified by the installed GPS sensor assists the crash/accident warning part of the system to send a help request to the nearest road emergency centre. These results verified that the probability of having a remote and smart car crash/accident decision support system using the proposed system has been improved compared to that of the existing systems.