Emergency Vehicle-Centered Traffic Signal Control in Intelligent Transportation Systems

The fast response of an emergency vehicle, such as an ambulance, fire engine, police vehicle, etc., is crucial to the protection of human life and property. With the steady increase of vehicles, the road intersection, a most congestion-prone zone, has become a great challenge to the emergency vehicle’s fast response despite its privilege of running a red light. To guarantee the safe, and fast pass of emergency vehicles stuck in congestion, an appropriate traffic signal control for emergency vehicle preemption is indispensable. In this work, we propose an emergency vehicle-centered traffic signal control, which focuses on the emergency vehicle’s performance, while minimising the negative impact on the traffic of conflicting directions. The proposed scheme can significantly decrease the emergency vehicle delay compared with the no preemption scheme (emergency vehicles have no priority), greatly reduce the impact on traffic of conflicting directions compared with the greedy preemption scheme (in which an emergency vehicle receives a green phase when it is detected to arrive at an intersection until it leaves), and notably lower the cost compared with the fuzzy logic-based scheme (which divides the real-time traffic conditions into several cases based on human knowledge and sets rules to control the signal accordingly).