A Study on the Preemption Control Strategies Considering Queue Length Constraints

Currently, the signalized intersections in Korea are operated without providing an emergency vehicle preemption control strategy. Thus, it might threaten the safety of the pedestrians and drivers on highways when an emergency vehicle faces congested traffic conditions. The existing preemption control is activated when an emergency vehicle is detected along a path. This enables emergency vehicles to progress uninterrupted, but it also increases the delay of other vehicles. In this paper, a revised preemption control strategy considering queue length restrictions is proposed to make both a progressive movement of an emergency vehicle and reduce delay of other vehicles simultaneously. By applying the preemption control strategy through a simulation study, it was shown that delay of an emergency vehicle decreased to 44.3%-96.1% and speed increased to 8.8%-42.0% in all 9 cases as compared with a conventional signal control. The existing preemption control is superior for oversaturated conditions (v/c >1.0) or a link length less than 200m. However, the preemption control considering queue length constraints shows better performance than the existing preemption control when the v/c is less than 0.8 and a link length is longer than 500m.