ABSTRACT
One of the greatest challenges for a traffic control system is to synchronize the flow of vehicles to prevent traffic jams. This issue gets worse when there are priority vehicles, such as ambulances, trying to move through the traffic. Given the current situation, with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the trends of smart cities, in this work, we propose and simulate a traffic control system that prioritizes ambulances within large urban centers, using Fuzzy logic and IoT devices. The simulation of our proposed model was performed on the software Dojot, which is an open platform for IoT modeling. It addressed a real situation, in a path that is usually used by ambulances to get to a reference hospital in the city of Campinas, Brazil. The proposed traffic control system can also be used after the COVID-19 pandemic is over in order to improve traffic flow for other priority vehicles (e.g., firefighters and police) and increase people’s life quality within smart cities. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.