Secure Distributed System inspired by Ant Colonies for Road Traffic Management in Emergency Situations

Abstract

In this work, we present a distributed system designed for road traffic management. The system is inspired by the behavior of the ant colonies. The distributed design responds to the particular limitations of an emergency situation; mainly, the fixed infrastructures are out of service because no energy supply is available. The implementation is based on the VANET facilities complemented with passive RFID tags or GPS localization. The vehicles can use the information of previous vehicles to dynamically decide the best path. A scale prototype has been developed to validate the system. It consists of several small size robotic vehicles, a test road circuit and a visual monitorization system. The security of the system is provided by a combination of data aggregation and reputation lists.