# Exploiting Traffic Light Coordination and Auctions for Intersection and Emergency Vehicle Management in a Smart City Mixed Scenario

## TL;DR

This paper proposes an auction-based system using IoT-enabled traffic lights to manage vehicle and emergency traffic in smart cities, reducing waiting times and trip durations.

## Contribution

The novel auction-based system uses traffic light coordination and bid propagation to manage mixed vehicle types without requiring special infrastructure for emergency vehicles.

## Key findings

- The proposed system outperformed fixed time control and non-coordinated auction strategies in reducing waiting times.
- Experiments on synthetic and real-world maps showed improved performance in trip times and intersection management.
- Emergency vehicles could navigate efficiently by simply increasing their budget in the auction system.

## Abstract

IoT (Internet-of-Things)-powered devices can be exploited to connect vehicles to smart city infrastructure, allowing vehicles to share their intentions while retrieving contextual information about diverse aspects of urban viability. In this paper, we place ourselves in a transient scenario in which next-generation vehicles that are able to communicate with the surrounding infrastructure coexist with traditional vehicles with limited or absent IoT capabilities. We focus on intersection management, in particular on reusing existing traffic lights empowered by a new management system. We propose an auction-based system in which traffic lights are able to exchange contextual information with vehicles and other nearby traffic lights with the aim of reducing average waiting times at intersections and consequently overall trip times. We use bid propagation to improve standard vehicle trip times while allowing emergency vehicles to free up the way ahead without needing ad hoc system for such vehicle, only an increase in their budget. The proposed system is then tested against two baselines: the classical Fixed Time Control system currently adopted for traffic lights, and an auction strategy that does not exploit traffic light coordination. We performed a large set of experiments using the well known MATSim transport simulator on both a synthetic Manhattan map and on a map we built of an urban area located in Modena, Northern Italy. Our results show that the proposed approach performs better than the classical fixed time control system and the auction strategy that does not exploit coordination among traffic lights.