Heuristic Strategies for Traffic Guidance in Scenarios with Multiple EVs and Multiple Accident Points

Emergency vehicles (EVs) play an important role in responding to time-critical accidents such as traffic accidents, medical emergencies, and urban fires. The increase in car ownership and the lag of road infrastructure construction have led to increasing urban traffic congestion, which seriously affects the rescue efficiency of EVs. Existing emergency traffic control strategies are often designed on the premise that a single EV goes to a single accident point, ignoring the complex environment of multiple EVs and multiple accident points. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-vehicle coordinated emergency traffic guidance heuristic strategy for the simultaneous presence of multiple EVs and multiple accident points in the traffic scene. This strategy ensures that the EVs can reach the emergency scene in time, and reduces the negative impact on other traffic participants (other EVs and regular vehicles). Firstly, the priority of the accident emergency degree was determined based on fuzzy logic. Secondly, two traffic guidance schemes were designed respectively for the situation that multiple EVs went to the same accident point from different starting points and multiple EVs went to different accident points from different starting points, so as to reduce the conflict in the process of traffic guidance. Finally, in order to test the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, this paper takes the traffic network of Manhattan Island in New York as a scene and uses the traffic simulation software SUMO to carry out simulation experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy is superior to the existing methods in terms of the emergency service response time of EVs and the normal traffic time delay caused by EVs.