An NTCIP-based Semantic ITS Middleware for Emergency Vehicle Preemption

To achieve automation in ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) environments, integrations for existing traffic management systems as well as various vehicle-centered systems need to be done without modification. This is in particular essential for an automated emergency vehicle preemption system, where traffic signal preemption should be more accurate, smooth, and secure. Current researches for ITS middleware do not give much thought on interoperability and performance, thus they cannot support such automation framework. This paper proposes Bevor, a semantic-based ITS middleware for emergency vehicle preemption based on NTCIP (U. S. National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol). By utilizing NTCIP protocols in Communication Layer, Bevor achieves communication and data interoperability across most devices and equipments; the deployment of NTCIP STMF also significantly improved the effectiveness of transmission. The Service Layer of Bevor is designed with the Web 3.0 framework and XML exchange, enabling easy access to semantic data as well as operations such as event detection, policy matching, etc. A prototype system was implemented, and the experimental results show that Bevor offers a great interoperability, more flexible automation control, semantic reuse, and improved performance.