A Collaborative Control Framework: Achieving Emergency Vehicle Priority While Minimizing Negative Impact on Ordinary Vehicles at Signalized Intersection

Abstract

When an emergency vehicle (EV) passes through an isolated signal intersection, it is crucial to ensure the efficient passage of the EV while minimizing the negative impact on ordinary vehicles (OVs), particularly in high-traffic flow scenarios. Given the constraints on temporal and spatial resources within intersection areas, OVs ahead of EV often face challenges in finding safe gaps for giving way, resulting in significant obstructions to OVs. This research introduces a novel collaborative control framework to jointly optimize dynamic emergency lane settings and signal schemes, considering EV priority and OVs benefits for a single signalized intersection. Firstly, we propose a dynamic emergency lane control algorithm to help obstructed EV in roadway segments by extending and reallocating temporal and spatial resources for vehicles. Then, we establish a collaborative control model considering EV priority and OVs benefits. Assigning the highest priority to the emergency priority phase, this model optimizes signal schemes to prevent interphase conflict, taking into account OVs benefits. Finally, our collaborative control framework also employs an Eco-Driving algorithm for the optimization of OV speed to reduce fuel consumption. The case study results reveal that in comparison to other baseline methods, our proposed model significantly reduces EV travel time, simultaneously lowering the travel time and fuel consumption of OVs. Sensitivity analysis of varying traffic flow scenarios reveals that, as vehicle volumes increase, our proposed method demonstrates more pronounced reductions in both EV and OV travel time. In addition, there is a progressive increase in the proportion of dynamic emergency lane utilization, with activation occurring at earlier locations.