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Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have become increasingly important for public transportation in Shanghai, China. In response, ShanghaiGrid (SG) aims to provide abundant intelligent transportation services to improve traffic conditions. A fundamental service in SG is to locate the nearest desirable vehicles for users. In this paper, we propose an innovative protocol called ANTS to locate a desirable vehicle close to the querying user. The protocol finely mimics the efficient searching strategy adopted by a lost ant searching for its nest. Taking query locality into account, ANTS can retrieve the closest vehicles satisfying the query with high probability but incurs small query latency and modest network traffic. ANTS is a fully distributed and robust protocol and, therefore, has good scalability. Extensive simulations based on the real road network and the trace data of vehicle movements in Shanghai demonstrate the efficacy of ANTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]