An Emergency Response System to Assist the Movement Of Vehicles During Emergency Operations In Urban Transportation Networks

Author

Jamal Nahofti Kohneh, Clemson UniversityFollow

Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Civil Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Dr. Pamela Murray-Tuite

Committee Member

Dr. Mashrur Chowdhury

Committee Member

Dr. Yongjia Song

Committee Member

Dr. Gaby Joe Hannoun

Abstract

Emergency responders need to arrive at the emergency scene as soon as possible, but operating vehicles under emergency conditions can pose a risk to both the responders and other road users, potentially resulting in crashes or delays in emergency operations. In this research, an emergency response system is proposed to assist emergency and non-emergency response vehicles (ERVs and non-ERVs) during emergency operations in a connected vehicle environment. This system collects the information from connected ERVs and non-ERVs, utilizes this information as inputs in the proposed models, and sends instruction messages back to vehicles. The proposed models provide the fastest ERV micro-path within each transportation link and are applicable to different types of roadways such as one-way roadways, two-way roadways with/without a median lane, and two-way roadways with/without a concrete median. To assist ERVs in congested roadways, different options such as using the contraflow lane (leftmost lane on the other side of the roadway), virtual emergency lane (an additional lane created by essentially narrowing the existing lanes and utilizing any additional space from hard shoulders), and median lane are addressed in the models. Different dynamic routing approaches are applied to help ERVs choose the shortest travel-time macro-path throughout the network by while using the optimization results of micro-paths (Two-Level Routing (TLR)) and preventing simultaneous utilization of a traffic signal by two ERVs/sets of ERVs from conflicting approaches that may cause delays (Link Recovery after the Two-Level Routing (LRR) and Link Recovery after Two-Level Coordinated Routing for Opposing ERVs (LRCRO)) since a traffic signal cannot allocate green time to two conflicting phases at the same time. Finally, to assist the non-emergency response vehicles in resuming their movement efficiently and safely after the passage of ERVs, a recovery strategy is proposed that utilizes mathematical equations to resume the movement of non-ERVs in the recovery phase. The traffic simulation tool SUMO is used to execute Dijkstra’s algorithm integrated with optimization results in this dynamic routing approach. Results demonstrate that the proposed framework (LRCRO) can improve the travel time of ERVs by 0-41% (0-401 seconds) compared to other approaches (static routing with/without optimization), depending on the distance between origins and destinations. Also, the proposed framework can improve the travel time of ERVs with lower mission priority by 6-13% (41-71 seconds) compared to both TLR and LRR approaches, where the second ERV must stop at the traffic signal and wait for the first ERV to go through. Additionally, the LRR approach can reduce the maximum queuing length by 8-42 meters in most lanes not used by ERVs compared to the TLR approach, but it increases the maximum queuing length by 8-33 meters in non-median lanes used by ERVs.

Recommended Citation

Nahofti Kohneh, Jamal, "An Emergency Response System to Assist the Movement Of Vehicles During Emergency Operations In Urban Transportation Networks" (2024). All Dissertations. 3748.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/3748

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0001-7040-0016