Emergency Vehicles in the Smart Cities: Challenges and Enabling Technologies

Carmelo Scribano, Filippo Muzzini

Abstract: Smart cities’ infrastructures offer several opportunities to increase cities’ livability. One of these is the chance to improve Emergency Vehicles’ response time. Reducing Emergency Vehicles’ response time can save lives and reduce congestion in traffic flow. On the other hand, the response time can be affected by uncontrolled traffic situations. Smart city’s capabilities can be exploited to manage traffic conditions to reduce response time, but it is not a trivial task. In this work, we analyze the challenges that must be considered in the design of traffic management systems and we show the enabling technologies able to sense traffic status and provide the necessary information to the traffic management system.