Pull over Strategy for the Evacuation of an Emergency Vehicle in Highways

By using a simplified two-lane cellular automata model for traffic flow, we simulate an evacuation of an emergency vehicle (EV) in highways. We introduce the pull over strategy to facilitate the evacuation of the EV in highways. We demonstrate numerically that this pulling over of cars promotes a faster moving of the EV in traffic flow and minimize the EV's impact on the overall traffic. Emergency vehicles (EV's) are the vehicles involving in special events or circumstance in order to provide emergency services to the public. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks are some examples of EV's. During the evacuation, there exists a great task for reaching the destination (e.g. hospital) as quickly as possible and with minimal interruptions. Death situation may occur in emergency evacuation if the arrival time of the EV for reaching its destination is delayed because of the lack of safe exit routes. The objective of this paper is to introduce a pull over strategy in order to facilitate the evacuation of the EV in highways. Cellular automata (CA) traffic modeling is always considered as an efficient *