Traffic signal coordination for emergency vehicles

Abstract

Reducing travel time of emergency vehicles (EVs) has a potential in significant savings of life and property. Integrating modern intelligent transportation system (ITS) with EV signal preemption seems to be a solution. But existing EV signal preemption systems often break the current signal coordination and impact a lot on the normal traffic streams. In this paper we propose an emergency vehicle signal coordination (EVSC) approach, which is intended to provide “green wave” for EVs. Traffic simulations are conducted along an emergency corridor with 8 intersections in Qingdao, China. Multiple traffic measurements are compared between simulation outputs with and without EVSC operation. The result indicates that the proposed approach can reduce EV travel time by 26.9% without too much negative impact on the normal traffic streams.