Prioritization of Exigency Services in Multi-Agent Transportation Systems

Abstract

Multi-agent system helps in achieving a single global goal by working on different tasks in a distributed environment. This research presents a new framework for handling the prioritization of exigency services in an urban transportation system. Prioritization in exigency services needs to be handled for vehicles like Ambulance, Police Mobile, Fire Brigade, Bomb Disposal Squads, Search and Rescue vehicles, Turntable Ladder, and other similar vehicles. In the proposed framework a single ARTIS agent with four In-agents is deployed at each signal node. In-Agents at different nodes share information about the exigency with the ARTIS Agent that analyses the input data and determines the types of conflict that might cause delays in emergency services provision. We operate the signal based on their priorities for exigency vehicles with different priorities. In case they have the same priorities then we use the lane congestion and vehicle wait time to operate a signal. We demonstrate the application of our proposed approach using different cases of a traffic case study.