Refined Path Planning for Emergency Rescue Vehicles on Congested Urban Arterial Roads via Reinforcement Learning Approach

Fast road emergency response can minimize the losses caused by traffic accidents. However, emergency rescue on urban arterial roads is faced with the high probability of congestion caused by accidents, which makes the planning of rescue path complicated. This paper proposes a refined path planning m...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Longhao Yan, Ping Wang, Jingwen Yang, Yu Hu, Yu Han, Junfeng Yao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2021-01-01
Series:Journal of Advanced Transportation
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2021/8772688
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Fast road emergency response can minimize the losses caused by traffic accidents. However, emergency rescue on urban arterial roads is faced with the high probability of congestion caused by accidents, which makes the planning of rescue path complicated. This paper proposes a refined path planning method for emergency rescue vehicles on congested urban arterial roads during traffic accidents. Firstly, a rescue path planning environment for emergency vehicles on congested urban arterial roads based on the Markov decision process is established, which focuses on the architecture of arterial roads, taking the traffic efficiency and vehicle queue length into consideration of path planning; then, the prioritized experience replay deep Q-network (PERDQN) reinforcement learning algorithm is used for path planning under different traffic control schemes. The proposed method is tested on the section of East Youyi Road in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China. The results show that compared with the traditional shortest path method, the rescue route planned by PERDQN reduces the arrival time to the accident site by 67.1%, and the queue length at upstream of the accident point is shortened by 16.3%, which shows that the proposed method is capable to plan the rescue path for emergency vehicles in urban arterial roads with congestion, shorten the arrival time, and reduce the vehicle queue length caused by accidents.
ISSN:0197-6729
2042-3195