A Novel Approach for Smoothing the Path of Emergency Vehicles in Urban Areas

Emergency vehicles (EVs) are crucial in responding to time-critical events such as traffic accidents, medical emergencies, and fires in urban areas. Most traffic control approaches try to reduce the travel time of EVs by giving them the highest road-use priority, which may cause delays for other nearby traffic participants and reduce the smoothness of normal traffic. This work proposes a novel approach to reduce both the travel time of an EV and the negative impact on normal traffic by dynamically evacuating traffic adjacent to an emergency path. The approach periodically acquires a subnet for each road segment of the emergency path based on dynamic traffic conditions. Regular vehicles on the subnet are restricted from using the emergency path, which minimizes the time for emergency service delivery. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing approach in many metrics, such as the travel time of the EV and the additional delay of normal traffic. In addition, this work performs sensitivity analysis on regular vehicles' compliance rate to evacuation. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed approach at different compliance rates.