Research Title: An efficient multi‐destinations trip planning protocol for intelligent transport system

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2019

International Journal of Numerical Modelling: Electronic Networks, Devices and Fields, 32

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Targeting several destinations on the same trip is commonly seen over the downtown areas. Several drivers leave their home or work everyday targeting multiple end‐destinations for shopping or entertaining purposes. The sequence of visiting destinations can be selected randomly by the drivers, especially if they are less familiar with the area of interest or with multi‐destinations trips. However, expert drivers that travel more frequently towards several destinations should be more cautious planning their trips. They consider the relative locations of these end‐destinations and use their historical knowledge regarding the traffic over the connected road segments there. This paper proposes an efficient multi‐destinations trip planning protocol (MDPP) that recommends drivers with the best sequence of destinations to visit. The proposed protocol considers the location of each destination and the relative distance between all located destinations. It also considers the traffic distribution over the investigated areas of interest to recommend drivers to avoid highly congested road segments or road segments that suffer traffic issue such as accident or emergency existence. From the experimental results, we can see that the MDPP protocol has selected the best path towards the targeted destinations compared with other common selected sequences. It has decreased the travel time, fuel consumption, and the gas emissions for different investigated scenarios.

Keywords: downtown, multi‐destinations, MDPP, VANETs, road efficiency, trip planner

Research Title: Safety and efficiency control protocol for highways using intelligent vehicular networks

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2019

Computer Networks, 152

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Several emergency cases negatively affect the traffic safety and efficiency over highway roads. Un-expected areas of traffic congestion are usually caused by the occurrence of an accident, existence of a damaged vehicle, or the appearance of an emergency vehicle. These scenarios have safety considerations regarding the involved vehicles in the event of emergency. However, the effect of these cases on surrounding vehicles is usually restricted to the parameters of traffic fluency and efficiency. However, in extreme scenarios, nearby vehicles may become involved in the emergency, such as in a chained accident. In this paper, we first aim to investigate the possible emergency cases over the highway roads. Secondly, we study the effects of these cases on the surrounding traveling vehicles, based on the relative location of each vehicle from the detected case, and the speed and moving direction of each vehicle. Third, we introduce a recommendation protocol that provides the most appropriate response to each vehicle in the vicinity of the detected emergency case. Reducing/increasing the vehicle’s speed, changing the traveling lane, and completely stopping the vehicle are the most popular responses in these scenarios. From the experimental results, we can see that the proposed protocol has increased the traffic fluency in the vicinity of the emergency cases over highways. It decreases the delay in vehicles’ traveling time and increases the throughput of each lane compared to the typical highway protocol. Moreover, it has increased the safety conditions for vehicles and decreased the percentage of vehicles to become involved in accidents.

Keywords: Accident detectionEmergency vehicleEmergency responseHighway road scenario

Research Title: An efficient dynamic traffic light scheduling algorithm considering emergency vehicles for intelligent transportation systems

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2018

Wireless Networks, 27

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Traffic lights have been installed throughout road networks to control competing traffic flows at road intersections. These traffic lights are primarily intended to enhance vehicle safety while crossing road intersections, by scheduling conflicting traffic flows. However, traffic lights decrease vehicles’ efficiency over road networks. This reduction occurs because vehicles must wait for the green phase of the traffic light to pass through the intersection. The reduction in traffic efficiency becomes more severe in the presence of emergency vehicles. Emergency vehicles always take priority over all other vehicles when proceeding through any signalized road intersection, even during the red phase of the traffic light. Inexperienced or careless drivers may cause an accident if they take inappropriate action during these scenarios. In this paper, we aim to design a dynamic and efficient traffic light scheduling algorithm that adjusts the best green phase time of each traffic flow, based on the real-time traffic distribution around the signalized road intersection. This proposed algorithm has also considered the presence of emergency vehicles, allowing them to pass through the signalized intersection as soon as possible. The phases of each traffic light are set to allow any emergency vehicle approaching the signalized intersection to pass smoothly. Furthermore, scenarios in which multiple emergency vehicles approach the signalized intersection have been investigated to select the most efficient and suitable schedule. Finally, an extensive set of experiments have been utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: Road network, Vehicular network, Emergency vehicle, Traffic light phases, Traffic light scheduling

Research Title: Safety Traffic Speed Recommendations for Critical Road Scenarios Using Vehicular Networks

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kansas City, MO, USA

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Long driving trips that traverse several states or counties are common these days, for tourism or products shipping aims. These trips are usually classified as dangerous trips due to the challenges and difficulties they introduce. The diversity of geometry and quality of road networks over the extended traveling areas, the diversity of weather conditions, and the long time of the day that drivers witness during these driving hours make even expert drivers in need for professional advices. In this work, we propose a driver assistance protocol that uses the real-time critical conditions of each driving area to recommend the safety speed. Moreover, this protocol measures the speed of each traveling vehicle and compares it to the recommended speed aiming to determine the severity of the dangerous situation introduced by drivers that are not following the safety recommendations. Severe scenarios should be reported to surrounding vehicles to be more careful regarding this irresponsible driver and/or reported to the driving authorities to enforce the driver to follow the driving safety rules.

Keywords: Roads , Vehicles , Safety , Meteorology , Protocols , Accidents , Geometry

Research Title: Toward a Smooth Vehicular Traffic at Round Road - Intersections

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2018

2018 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, United Arab Emirates

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Roundabouts or traffic cycles reduce the possibilities of accidents and smooth the traffic at road intersections. In order to master the rules of driving around these traffic cycles intensive practicing is required. The more congested the area of the roundabout, the more confused for drivers to drive there. Especially, fresh or exhausted drivers which panic or/and do mistakes while entering, cycling or existing the roundabout. In this work, we aim to introduce a driving assistance protocol to help drivers choosing the best lane to enter the roundabout and the best time to enter or exist the roundabout. The proposed protocol recommends the best reaction of any vehicle regarding the roundabout based on its location, its targeted destination, and the distribution of traffic in the vicinity of the roundabout. Using some experimental scenarios, we evaluate the performance of this protocol in terms of decreasing the percentage of accidents, increasing throughput of the roundabout and decreasing the waiting delay time of vehicles.

Keywords: Roads , Vehicles , Protocols , Accidents , Safety , Delays

Research Title: A performance evaluation of a fault-tolerant path recommendation protocol for smart transportation system

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2016

Wireless Networks, 24

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Recommending traveling vehicles to take a certain path towards their targeted destinations have received great interest recently. At the downtown area several paths can lead to the same located destination, this is due to the grid-layout architecture of modern downtowns. Drivers always wish to reach their destinations as fast as possible and without traveling drastically long distance or without consuming extra fuel. The best path towards any destination is determined based on the relative location of the vehicle from its destination and based on other vehicles traffic distribution on the road network. Although numerous studies have investigated this issue over the road network, the communication failures and their effects on the obtained path have been neglected in those previous studies. In this paper, we investigate these potential faults and their effects on the correctness of the selected paths. We then proposed a new protocol to tackle these potential failures while selecting the best path towards each destination over the road network, fault tolerant path recommendation protocol (FT-PR). From the experimental results, we can see that the FT-PR protocol has a higher success ratio than previous path recommendation protocols, such as ICOD. This is demonstrated by obtaining paths with shorter traveling time and shorter traveling distance. The FT-PR protocol also eliminates extra loops over the road network in each selected path.

Keywords: fault-tolerant, path recommendations

Research Title: A vehicular network based intelligent lane change assistance protocol for highways

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2017

2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Paris, France

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Drivers change the lane over the road networks is a common seen practice when they face a slow, stopped or broken vehicle. Sometimes they have to change the lane to take the next exist or the next U-turn towards their targeted destination. Changing the lane requires that the driver should be aware of vehicles behind him on the new lane or vehicles intending to change to the same lane during that period of time. If any of these vehicles are located on the blind-spot or if the driver miss-expect that vehicle's location or speed, his attempt of changing the lane can be failed or on some scenarios this may lead to an accident. On highways this type of accident can be fatal due to the high speed vehicles which do not allow drivers to stop the severity situation. This paper presents an Intelligent LAne CHange assistant protocol (ILACH) for highway road scenario. This protocol assists drivers to change the lane safely and efficiently. Several scenarios are considered where a certain driver attempts to change the lane. From the experimental results we can see that the proposed protocol enhances the safety and the efficiency of the tested scenarios.

Keywords: Switches , Vehicles , Protocols , Roads , Accidents , Safety INSPEC: Controlled Indexing

Research Title: An Adaptive Traffic Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Mobile Delay-Tolerant Sensor Networks

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2016

2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Washington, DC, USA

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Delay-tolerant sensor networks (DTSNs) require efficient MAC transmission strategies that include energy constraint, relaxed latency, mobility support and diverse traffic load. Reservation-based and contention-based MAC schemes are used to improve throughput and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a traffic adaptive, energy-efficient MAC protocol to achieve better data transmissions and as energy consumption, in order to satisfy the requirements in DTSN. In our protocol, reservation and contention modes are adjustable, in order to adapt to the traffic load with a suitable duty cycle length for achieving energy efficiency. The simulation results of our protocol demonstrate better performance in terms of energy efficiency and traffic adaptability than the schedule-based MAC protocol TDMA, the contention-based protocol CSMA, and the traffic adaptive protocol TRAMA under mobile DTSN environments.

Keywords: Media Access Protocol , Energy consumption , Mobile communication , Data communication , Topology , Synchronization

Research Title: Traffic Efficiency Protocol for Highway Roads in Vehicular Network

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2016

2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Washington, DC, USA

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) technology has been utilized in recent applications to enhance the traffic fluency over the road network. Various types of emergency cases may negatively affect the efficiency of traffic flow in highway road scenarios, including accidents, damaged vehicles or the presence of emergency vehicles. These cases exaggerate the traffic problems in severe congestion scenarios. In this paper, we propose a traffic efficiency protocol which first aims to detect emergency cases over highway road scenarios. Then, it recommends the most appropriate response for each vehicle affected by the detected emergency case. The best response for each vehicle is determined based on the vehicle's location and speed. Our protocol also considers overall traffic conditions over the investigated road scenario. From the experimental results, we can prove that our proposed protocol has increased traffic fluency in the vicinity of emergency cases over highway road scenarios. Moreover, it has increased safety conditions for vehicles in such scenarios.

Keywords: Roads , Accidents , Protocols , Safety , Vehicles , Algorithm design and analysis

Research Title: Context-aware traffic light self-scheduling algorithm for intelligent transportation systems

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2016

2016 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, Doha, Qatar

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Traffic lights are located on the road intersections to control and manage the competing traffic flows. Several algorithms have been proposed considering the real-time traffic characteristics of each competing traffic flow at the road intersection. Emergency vehicles such as ambulance, fire truck and police vans should have higher priorities to cross any road intersection first. Whenever an emergency vehicle appears close to any road intersection, all vehicles on the competing flows should stop and allow that vehicle to proceed first. However, this may cause a hazards situation in the case that any driver miss-behaves or insists to follow the current traffic light phase. In this paper, we aim at designing a context-aware traffic light self-scheduling (CA-TLS) algorithm. This algorithm uses the traffic characteristics of the traffic flows and the emergency vehicles presence on the competing flows at any signalized road intersection. First, these parameters are gathered using periodic advertisement messages of traveling vehicles. Then, the CA-TLS algorithm sets the phases of each traffic light cycle according to the traffic gathered data. The green phase of any traffic flow can be interrupted to enable the fast proceeding of the appeared emergency vehicles. An extensive set of experiments have shown that this algorithm decreases the delay time of emergency vehicles at the signalized road intersections.

Keywords: Vehicles , Roads , Law enforcement , Algorithm design and analysis , Schedules , Delays , Scheduling algorithms