Traffic Management For Emergency Vehicle Routing

An ambulance inward a couple of seconds late can be the difference between life and death for some. As different technologies emerge, various approaches to expediting the movement of emergency, Vehicles have evolved. Horns, sirens and blinking lights were early attempts that are no longer sufficient in most places to clear traffic on the emergency vehicle’s route. In these situations, traffic signal pre-emption has made it possible to guide traffic to move in favour of clearing the emergency vehicle’s route. Early traffic signal pre-emption approaches depended on direct communication between an emergency vehicle’s signal emitter and a corresponding signal receiver on the traffic light it was approaching. Consequently, the position of the vehicle could be detected. Later, (D)GPS was used to more precisely locate the emergency vehicle. This solution was more improved by using competent or uniform ideal path planning algorithms to select the path of the emergency vehicle. In the state-of-the-art in emergency vehicle routing. We implement a graph version of the D*Lite informed search algorithm to efficiently and dynamically plan optimal paths for the emergency vehicle while taking into consideration the real-time updates of congestion levels and other delays to travel time. The results validate our hypothesis demonstrating that traffic management can improve travel time under uncertain congestion conditions, and that incorporating an appropriate traffic light pre-emption mechanism can further improve travel time for an emergency vehicle; potentially saving lives.