Emergency Traffic-Light Control System Design for Intersections Subject to Accidents

Petri nets (PNs) are well utilized as a visual and mathematical formalism to model discrete-event systems. This paper uses deterministic and stochastic PNs to design an emergency traffic-light control system for intersections providing emergency response to deal with accidents. According to blocked crossing sections, as depicted by dynamic PN models, the corresponding emergency traffic-light strategies are designed to ensure the safety of an intersection. The cooperation among traffic lights/facilities at those affected intersections and roads is illustrated. For the upstream neighboring intersections, a traffic-signal-based emergency control policy is designed to help prevent accident-induced large-scale congestion. Deadlock recovery, livelock prevention, and conflict resolution strategies are developed. We adopt a reachability analysis method to verify the constructed model. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that employs PNs to model and design a real-time traffic emergency system for intersections facing accidents. It can be used to improve the state of the art in real-time traffic accident management and traffic safety at intersections.