Making way for emergency vehicles at oversaturated signals under vehicle-to-vehicle communications

This paper presents a new strategy to enable emergency vehicles to navigate through congestion at signalized intersections more efficiently. The proposed strategy involves communicating control messages to vehicles to change their behavior so that the emergency response vehicle (EV) can go through the congested intersection as quickly as possible. To achieve that, the vehicular queue on one of the traffic lanes is split at a critical point so that the EV can proceed at its maximum speed while the disruption to the rest of the traffic is minimized. The proposed method makes use of the kinematic wave theory (i.e., shockwave theory) to determine this critical point. The proposed method is simulated in a microscopic traffic simulator for validation and evaluation. The results show that this strategy can shorten the trip time for EVs significantly.