Emergency Vehicle @ Red Lights

Another important behaviour exhibited by emergency vehicles is their ability to blow red lights.

Since there is minimal built in support for emergency vehicles in SUMO, this behaviour will have to be constructed by hand.

I have two main ideas for implementing this: The first involves finding a way to make a vehicle ignore traffic rules/traffic signals outright. The second involves changing the traffic light phase dynamically when an emergency vehicle approaches to give it a “green light” to allow it to pass what would normally be the red phase of a traffic signal cycle.

I am unsure if there is some combination of built-in vehicle attributes that allows for the behaviour described in the first possible solution. Certainly someone has tried modelling intersection accidents in SUMO before. This would invlove a vehicle not behaving traffic rules so perhaps this behaviour could be extended for emergency vehicles. Although we don’t want a crash to occur! I will try to find any research on accident modelling and go from there.

Andrew Vaillancourt

Undergraduate Computer Science student at The University of Manitoba