Adaptive Traffic Management for Emergency Vehicles in Work Zones

A work zone is a section of road with closed lanes for maintenance, forcing vehicles to merge and creating congestion bottlenecks on the highway. Emergency Vehicles (EVs) are vital for incident response, with response times closely tied to fatality rates. EVs often face challenges when navigating work zones, and despite their importance, little attention has been given to improving their movement through these areas, highlighting the need for a system that enables quicker EV passage in work zones. While traffic management strategies are implemented in work zones, their effectiveness for EVs remains unexplored. This leaves a gap in understanding work zone management for EVs, ensuring their fast and safe passage. This paper proposes the ADAPtive Emergency MERGing (ADAPT-EMERG) algorithm to address this gap. This algorithm controls vehicles longitudinally for smooth merging into the open lane. It integrates merging approaches, headway adjustment between vehicles, and Variable Speed Limit (VSL) rules to set speed limits. Simulation results show that the ADAPT-EMERG algorithm reduces average travel times by 40%, minimises time loss for EVs by an average of 5%, and achieves a throughput increase across various traffic scenarios compared to the state-of-the-art strategies.