Timely and Non-Disruptive Response of Emergency Vehicles: A Real-Time Approach
Pratham Oza, Thidapat Chantem · 2021
Facilitating timely traversal of emergency response vehicles (ERVs), especially through an urban road network remains a challenging task. ERV preemption is a technique commonly used to facilitate prioritized ERV traversal. Unplanned deployment of ERV preemption can induce network-wide traffic delays. This paper presents an ERV preemption strategy (considering ERV urgency levels) that proactively manages the traffic before, during and after ERV traversal by leveraging connected infrastructure to guarantee timely ERV travel while minimizing traffic delays. We also provide worst-case wait time bounds for non-emergency vehicles during ERV preemption. Our proposed approach does not introduce any additional delay in ERV traversal over existing approaches while also showing up to 43% reduction in average non-emergency traffic delays.