A Proactive Emergency Vehicle Control Strategy Based on Automated Driving Technologies

This study proposes an integrated driving control strategy by taking advantage of the automated driving technology at the individual vehicle level and the traffic signal preemption strategy at the traffic infrastructure level. This aims to facilitate an automated driving-based emergency vehicle control and ultimately to achieve efficient and safe control of emergency vehicles. To this end, this study developed the integrated emergency vehicle control logic, implemented the logic in the microscopic traffic simulation environment using the simulation software’s application programming interface capability, and evaluated the impacts of the proposed emergency vehicle control logic in the aspects of mobility and safety with different driving aggressiveness and preemption initiation settings. The results show that the proposed emergency vehicle control logic achieved benefits on mobility and safety within the normal driving concept that does not allow special right-of-way rules while it did not produce significant side-impact to adjacent vehicles. In addition, conservative or intolerant lane changes appeared no benefit especially in terms of safety, and these lane change schemes were even worse than the Base scenario, which does not consider both the signal preemption and the automated driving control. The study results emphasize that the benefit of emergency vehicle control strategy can be maximized when the signal preemption and the automated driving control operate in collaboration.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB15 Standing Committee on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
• Authors:
  • So, Jaehyun
  • Krause, Sabine
  • Kaths, Jakob
  • Tian, Liangyuan
  • Moon, Young Jun
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automated vehicle control for ground vehicles; Car following; Emergency vehicles; Intelligent vehicles; Microscopic traffic flow; Traffic models; Traffic signal preemption
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01660246
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-02598
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 20 2018 9:27AM