Study Testing Cooperative Driving Strategies with German Highway Data Found a 17.2 Percent Reduction in Emergency Vehicle Travel Time.
Simulation Study Used Naturalistic Driving Data to Assess Lane Pre-Clearing Strategies for Emergency Vehicles Over a Short Highway Segment.
Germany
Emergency vehicle lane pre-clearing: From microscopic cooperation to routing decision making
Summary Information
Emergency vehicles (EMVs) play a critical role in ensuring timely response during emergencies, helping to save lives and reduce property damage. This study introduced a lane pre-clearing strategy designed to prioritize EMVs by enabling cooperative maneuvers among surrounding Connected Vehicles (CVs). Specifically, the strategy computes optimal trajectories for non-emergency vehicles to collectively clear one lane for an approaching EMV on highway segments. These trajectories are determined based on the EMV’s target speed, as well as the real-time positions and velocities of nearby vehicles. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach, a case study was conducted using field data collected from German highways in 2018.
METHODOLOGY
The designed cooperative driving strategy aims to ensure maintaining the desired speed of EMVs and minimize the disturbances on CVs. A two-step approach was used to solve the problem. First, the CVs in front of the emergency vehicle were grouped into sections. For each section, an algorithm helped figure out the best trajectory for these vehicles to move aside smoothly. Then, in the second step, the model decided the best time and place to start this maneuver so the emergency vehicle could pass through efficiently. For the case study, naturalistic driving data including location and speed were recorded on different highway segments without ramp and weaving sections nearby. The dataset was released in 60 trajectory tracks with each track covering about 420-meter length of the six-lane bidirectional highway.
FINDINGS
In comparison, the EMV took 4.54 seconds to pass a 252-foot segment without the strategy. With the strategy, it needed 3.76 seconds, a 17.2 percent reduction in travel time.
