Emergency Vehicle Modelling

I came across a vehicle attribute which may be useful when modelling emergency vehicles.

Vehicles in SUMO are, under normal circumstances, forbidden from passing a vehicle on the right. There is an attribute which will explicitly allow this for chosen vehicles.

Emergency vehicles are also not prohibited to following the speed limit(except for safety reason of course). There are several ways to model this but the most natural seems to be setting a traditional speed limit between edges which normal vehicles must abide by but specifying a higher speed factor for emergency vehicles. The default speed factor is 1.0, which limits vehicles top speed to that specified for the edge, even if the vehicle itself is capable of a higher speed. Increasing the ‘speedFactor’ attribute to 1.2 behaves as expected and raises the max speed allowed by that vehicle by 20%. This effectively allows emergency vehicles to break the speed limit without having to alter the attributes of any other vehicles or edges.

Andrew Vaillancourt

Undergraduate Computer Science student at The University of Manitoba