Improving Lane Level Dynamics for EV Traversal: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Akanksha Tyagi, Meghna Lowalekar, Praveen Paruchuri

Abstract: Emergency vehicles (EVs) perform a critical task of attending medical emergencies and delay in their operations can result in loss of lives to long term or permanent health implications. Therefore, it is very important to design strategies that can reduce the delay of EVs caused by slow moving traffic. Most of the existing work on this topic focuses on assignment and dispatch of EVs from different base stations to hospitals or finding the appropriate routes from dispatch location to hospital. However, these works ignore the effect of lane changes when EV is travelling on a stretch of a road. In this work, we focus on lane level dynamics for EV traversal and showcase that a pro-active picking of lanes can result in significant reductions in traversal time. In particular, we design a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model to compute the most optimal lane for an EV to travel at each timestep. We propose RLLS (Reinforcement Learning based Lane Search) algorithm for a general purposes EV trave