Ontology Based Road Traffic Management in Emergency Situations
A.J. Bermejo, J. Villadangos, J.J. Astrain, A. Córdoba , L. Azpilicueta, U. Gárate and F. Falcone
Every time an exceptional situation takes place on the road, dangerous situations occur and they need the drivers’ skills in order to cope with them. These special situations can occur due to many reasons such as a nonexpected object on the road, or an incoming emergency vehicle. Current proposals consider that vehicles are equipped with sensors and communication devices that collect and communicate sensor data to a central point to take further decisions. In this paper, those exceptional situations are handled in a different way: we propose to integrate an ontology inside each vehicle to provide them with distributed reasoning capabilities. Our system benefits traffic management in emergency situations with immediate and coherent suggestions to drivers where each vehicle is a decision point, reacts considering its neighboring vehicles, and collaborates with them to reach consensus in real time. A complete analysis of the system is given, from the behavior of the wireless link channel to the application level, giving an integral description of the designed solution. The system operates continuously adapting itself to driver reactions. A common ontology provides, during the reasoning process, a suggestion to each driver, maintaining the coherence of the whole set of suggestions (avoiding conflicting situations).
Keywords: VANET, traffic management, decision, ontology, emergency.