Dr. Syed Haider
An article by Associate Professor Syed Haider that outlines traffic congestion mitigation has been published in the Springer Computing Journal.
A co-author with Dr. Haider of the article, "Mapping and just‑in‑time traffic congestion mitigation for emergency vehicles in smart cities,” is Dr. Junaid Zubari. Both are in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. There is also an international collaborator from Jordan.
The paper presents a simulation model, for congested city environments, to help find the optimal path for emergency vehicles to reach the incident location in the least possible time. The proposed algorithm focuses on diverting traffic automatically at run time to make way for emergency vehicles by blocking off roads and intersections that feed new traffic to the preferred path.
The preferred path is cleared of traffic just-in-time for the emergency vehicles to pass unhindered. The simulation is based on a probabilistic model that is compared with real-life traffic data from the New York Department of Transportation.
The results show that the proposed algorithm allows for better response time, in most situations, when compared with the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) guidelines and U.S. national average.
