Facilitating Emergency Response Vehicles’ Movement Through a Road Segment in a Connected Vehicle Environment

Emergency response vehicles' (ERVs) travel is risky, as non-ERV drivers are often unsure of the ERV's next maneuver and how to facilitate its movement. An integer linear program (ILP), introduced in this paper, facilitates the ERV's movement through a transportation link. Leveraging vehicle-to-vehicle communications, information is collected about vehicles on a link section. Then, the ILP finds the ERV's fastest intra-link path. To increase safety, the ILP assigns non-ERVs locations as far away from the ERV as possible while avoiding passing and weaving among vehicles. The ILP can be adapted to different ERV sizes, road types, and surrounding conditions. Sensitivity analysis indicated that scenarios with narrower road segments and higher numbers of non-ERVs led to ERV paths with lane changes and higher computation times. When compared with the current practice requiring non-ERVs to move to the nearest road edge when an ERV with lights and sirens is noticed, the proposed formulation improved the ERV speed while reducing the conflicts and confusion experienced by downstream vehicles.