EPIC - Emergency Vehicle Traffic Light Pre-emption in Cities
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | H&E Solutions AB |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 2 853 733 |
| Project duration | November 2020 - December 2022 |
| Status | Completed |
| Venture | Traffic safety and automated vehicles -FFI |
| Call | Road safety and automated vehicles - FFI - June 2020 |
| End-of-project report | 2020-02945eng.pdf (pdf, 331 kB) |
Important results from the project
The main purpose of EPIC was to design and demonstrate a system, compliant with the European standardization effort, that allows emergency vehicles to send requests for green light pre-emption to signalized intersections. By eliminating the need for emergency vehicles to run red-lights at intersections, the system will be able to guarantee that a safe and fast passage would be facilitated.
Expected long term effects
Testing was performed using real-time GPS data from the Swedish cities of Uppsala and Stockholm. The results were positive, with the system able to perform according to the desired specifications under a myriad of traffic conditions. The functional specifications are being fulfilled. To further prove the benefits of the systems more results were collected through traffic flow simulations. The experiments conducted yielded an average improvement in trip time of 30.15% and 71.66% in the proposed safety metric (time integrated time-to-collision indicator - TIT).
Approach and implementation
A prototype of the preemption system running on a simulated version of the Interchange mechanism would be developed in order to answer this research questions. Once viability was confirmed via experiments, the development of the system went into the production phase. At this stage, the system had to be integrated with the real Interchange (the newest version) allowing for testing on realistic scenarios in Sweden. To further, statistically prove, the benefits of the solution traffic flow simulations were made. The simulation was used to evaluate the performance of the system.