Signal Priority Request Delay Modeling and Mitigation for Emergency Vehicles in Connected Vehicle Environment

Abstract

Connected vehicle-based signal priority control is widely regarded as an advanced method for improving travel efficiency of an emergency vehicle when passing through intersections. However, the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication delay is a critical factor affecting the performance of signal request and has rarely been considered in existing studies. This paper conducted a comprehensive delay analysis of the preemption signal request and its influence on practical preemption control for the emergency vehicle. First of all, a general end-to-end delay decomposition model is formulated to analyze significant delay uncertainties from different sources. Then, a compensated distance strategy is adopted for cooperative preemption control to ensure the reliability of preemption control and minimize impacts on performance caused by communication delay. Based on the analysis of field data and numerical results, the proposed model is able to reveal characteristics of communication delay for multimodal traffic signal control with priority. The proposed communication delay compensation strategy shows clear benefits in improving the performance of signal preemption control priority for an emergency vehicle at intersections and therefore has potential to enhance V2X applications in a connected vehicle environment.