Dynamic Traffic Signal Control for Emergency Vehicle Priority in Urban Networks

Urban traffic congestion significantly slows down ambulances. Every minute lost can be life-threatening. Current emergency vehicle systems rely on fixed signal overrides or manual coordination, which do not work well in changing traffic situations. This paper presents Preemptive Signal Orchestration (PSO), a predictive traffic signal coordination framework for cities. PSO creates adaptable green corridors for ambulances through smart preemption. PSO combines real-time GPS tracking with a centralized traffic management server. This setup allows the system to predict the ambulance's route and change traffic lights ahead of it. PSO is designed for easy integration with current traffic systems and mobile interfaces, which removes the need for special hardware. Simulation studies in the SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility) environment, using realistic traffic scenarios from Bengaluru, show that PSO reduces coordination delays by over 94%compared to traditional methods. It maintains clearance efficiency (CE) between 97.8% and 98.3% and has a system reliability of 1.00. The system allows emergency response times of 0.7 to 0.8 seconds, ensuring quick and reliable corridor formation with minimal disruption thus showing how predictive, data-driven traffic management can greatly improve emergency response efficiency and support resilient urban mobility systems with AI.