Yielding to Emergency Vehicles

A potential solution is to use detectors in combination with TraCI to force passenger vehciles to change lanes when an EV is approaching. This is through the use of a TraCI command called changeLane(self, vehID, laneIndex, duration). We can use detectors to keep track of vehicles that are in front of the EV and then force the vehicles to switch to a given lane. This will allow emergency vehicles to overtake the passenger vehicles. The duration paramter in changeLane() is useful as the passenger vehicles can then resume normal lane behaviour once the EV has passed them without having to explicitly tell them. This still does not behave naturally as is because all vehicles ahead of the EV will yield, regardless of distance, or even if the yielding vehicle is in the same path as the EV. There will need to be a way to solve this by adding more detectors or using TraCI commands.

Andrew Vaillancourt

Undergraduate Computer Science student at The University of Manitoba