Based on Synchronized Timed Petri Nets for Emergency Vehicle Preemption Systems

Abstract

Timed Petri net (TPN) has been utilized as a visual formalism for the modeling of complex discrete event dynamic systems. It illuminates the features on describing properties of causality and concurrency. Moreover, it is well-known that synchronized timed Petri net (STPN) allows us to present all of the concurrent states in complex TPN. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to design, analyze and implement an urban emergency vehicle preemption control system by using STPN. The applications of STPN to two-phase traffic lights and emergency vehicle preemption are illustrated. The advantage of the proposed approach is the clear presentation of traffic lights’ behaviors in terms of conditions and events that cause the preemption phases alternations. Finally, a two-phase traffic lights control system with emergency vehicle preemption will be realized by using STPN. To our knowledge, this is the first work that employs STPN to model a two-phase traffic lights control system with emergency vehicle preemption system.