Design and Implementation of an Emergency Vehicle Signal Preemption System Based on Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Technology

Abstract

Emergency vehicle is an important part of traffic flow. The efficiency, reliability, and safety of emergency vehicle operations dropped due to increasing traffic congestion. With the advancement of the wireless communication technologies and the development of the vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (v2i) systems, called Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure System (CVIS), there is an opportunity to provide appropriate traffic signal preemption for emergency vehicle based on real-ime emergency vehicle data, traffic volume data, and traffic signal timings. This paper describes the design and implementation of an Emergency Vehicle Signal Preemption System (TJ-EVSP) in CVIS environment. The system function, system architecture, and operation strategies were presented. Then, the system was deployed and validated at two adjacent intersections in Taicang City, Jiangsu Province, China. Results show that the proposed system can improve the efficiency of emergency vehicle operations with less waste of traffic resources.