Preemption traffic network design for fire services

Traffic Signal Preemption (TSP) is an operational strategy that facilitates the movement of emergency vehicles through signaled intersections. TSP installations involve non-trivial costs, hence for most metropolises, only selected intersections can receive such capability. With an objective of minimizing the fire response time, a two-tier methodology is presented for selecting optimal TSP locations in a metropolis. In tier one, selecting TSP locations in a fire zone is modeled as a multi-commodity network flow problem. In tier two, the high-impact TSP locations are then selected over the entire metropolis. Experimental results based on the Pittsburgh road network are presented.