Performance Evaluation of an Emergency Vehicle in a Simulated Traffic Scenario

In addition to the traditional acoustic siren, an emergency vehicle can use wireless communication to warn other vehicles or traffic lights of its presence, either in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) mode. The use of this technology can reduce accident risks during emergency response trips, help save time, and eventually rescue lives. Yet, an algorithm is required to help vehicles and traffic lights to take the right actions upon receiving a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) message from a nearby emergency vehicle. For this goal, a collaborative algorithm was developed and deployed in a simulated road traffic scenario with traffic lights. This scenario was used to evaluate the performance of an ambulance using both V2X communications ruled by the proposed algorithm and the traditional siren. Results show that the performance of the ambulance improves globally when V2X communications are used rather than the siren, namely in terms of average trip distance and CO2 emission.This work was sponsored by the Portugal Incentive System for Research and Technological Development. Project in co-promotion no. 002797/2015 (IN-NOVCAR 2015-2018), and also by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013