A connected vehicle based traffic signal control strategy for emergency vehicle preemption

Connected Vehicle (CV) technologies such as Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) promise major benefits in both mobility and safety applications. One of the CV applications is connected traffic signal preemption for emergency vehicles enabling the rapid movement of emergency vehicles in urban arterials. This paper describes an innovative signal control strategy proposed to decrease Emergency Vehicle Response Time (EVRT). By employing V2I communication and IEEE 802.11p beaconing concept as well as the predicted queue length, traffic signals are adjusted adaptively to provide an early green at the right time so that the queue at the downstream intersections can be served just in time for the arrival of an emergency vehicle. The strategy is implemented in the microscopic traffic simulator, SUMO and evaluated using the City of Toronto network. In addition, a Python-based program is developed to link the control strategy to SUMO for simulating the traffic with intelligent traffic signals. The simulation results show a significant reduction in EVRT using the proposed method.