Emergency vehicle avoidance method based on coordinated control of connected autonomous driving vehicles

The research on methods how to avoid emergency vehicles (EVs) on urban expressways without emergency lanes plays an important supporting role in ensuring the safety of EVs and their quick arrival at rescue sites. This paper focuses on the problem of how to avoid EVs on the urban expressway in a connected human-machine hybrid driving environment. First, by using connected autonomous driving vehicles (CAVs) as the control objects, a control segment dividing rule based on CAVs distribution was designed. Then, a CAV speed coordinated control integer nonlinear programming model for avoiding EVs was established. At the same time, in order to reduce the impact on the vehicles in the target lane, a speedy recovery strategy for the controlled CAV was presented. Finally, the effectiveness of the methodology was demonstrated by simulation experiments. The results indicate that in the experimental scenario, compared with no CAVs control, the proposed method can significantly improve the efficiency of EV operation by about 22%, and compared with no CAV speed recovery, the controlled CAV in the target lane driving distance can increase by about 47.9%.