Routing Emergency Vehicles in Arterial Road Networks using Real-time Mixed Criticality Systems*

Abstract: Reducing the response time of Emergency Vehicles (EVs) has an undoubted advantage in saving life and property. Implementing pre-emption can aid in achieving it. EVs get unobstructed movement via pre-emption, usually by altering traffic signals and giving a green wave throughout the route. This approach of absolute pre-emption effects adversely on regular traffic by imposing unnecessary waiting. In this paper, we propose a novel emergency vehicle pre-emption (EVP) algorithm implemented in the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) that can reduce the imposed undesirable waiting time, but still ascertains EVs meet target response time. We introduce mixed-criticality real-time system scheduling concept where different level of emergencies is mapped with different criticality levels and assign certain success assurance level to respective criticality. We implemented the EVP algorithm for an arterial traffic network and leveraged the use of valuable information that gets transmitted via VANET to make critical decisions. The proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the average waiting time of regular traffic. It also ascertains all EVs with different level of criticality meet target response time respective to their assurance level.