SPACE: Smart priority-aware congestion elimination in urban traffic systems

Abstract

The rapid growth in the number of vehicles on urban road networks has significantly increased traffic congestion, leading to longer travel times, increased fuel consumption, and increased carbon emissions in the environment. Limited road capacity and unpredicted road incidents, such as vehicle crashes and stalled vehicles on the roads, further impact traffic flow and create bottlenecks. However, these disturbance not only affect the regular passengers, but emergency vehicles such as ambulances, fire engines, and police units also suffered, where response time is critical for public. Add-on, the selection of inefficient routes during these situations also increase in excessive fuel consumption and increased greenhouse gas emissions (C O2). To address these challenges, this paper proposes an eco-aware and weighted-based routing framework supported by an orchestratordriven traffic management architecture. The proposed approach integrates real-time traffic information, incident detection, and vehicle priority classification to dynamically evaluate candidate routes between an origin and destination. The orchestrator uses a cost-based routing mechanism that incorporates multiple traffic and environmental metrics, including travel time, congestion index, and carbon emissions. Furthermore, a priority-aware mechanism ensures that high-priority vehicles are assigned routes that emphasize minimal travel time, while lower-priority vehicles are guided through environmentally efficient paths considering the Net Zero targets.