A Joint Design of Path Planning and Lane Reservation for Emergency Service in ITS

Reaching the accident scene promptly for emergency vehicles (EVs) can significantly alleviate the negative impact of accidents. However, finding a way to reduce the response time of EVs (i.e., the travel time of an EV to reach the rescue location) remains a challenge that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we design a distributed intelligent transportation system (DITS) powered by vehicular fog computing (VFC), which offers new possibilities for designing traffic scheduling methods. We propose a soft actor-critic-based EV rapid passage approach (SACRP) to minimize the response time of EVs. The collaborative lane reservation module uses the latest traffic data to create a traffic dispatch strategy to reserve empty lane. Subsequently, we propose a soft actor-critic-based algorithm as the real-time path planning module. The path planning module integrates vital road information, such as lane reservation priority, real-time road data, EV location, and traffic signal information. The path planning module strategically plans the path with the shortest response time for the EV. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and the results show that the response time for EVs could be reduced by 24.6% compared to the latest study.