mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

EMVLight: a Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for an Emergency Vehicle Decentralized Routing and Traffic Signal Control System

arXiv 2206.13441 ↗First posted 27 Jun 2022cs.AI cs.SY eess.SYcited by 9

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Abstract (arXiv)

Emergency vehicles (EMVs) play a crucial role in responding to time-critical calls such as medical emergencies and fire outbreaks in urban areas. Existing methods for EMV dispatch typically optimize routes based on historical traffic-flow data and design traffic signal pre-emption accordingly; however, we still lack a systematic methodology to address the coupling between EMV routing and traffic signal control. In this paper, we propose EMVLight, a decentralized reinforcement learning (RL) framework for joint dynamic EMV routing and traffic signal pre-emption. We adopt the multi-agent advantage actor-critic method with policy sharing and spatial discounted factor. This framework addresses the coupling between EMV navigation and traffic signal control via an innovative design of multi-class RL agents and a novel pressure-based reward function. The proposed methodology enables EMVLight to learn network-level cooperative traffic signal phasing strategies that not only reduce EMV travel time but also shortens the travel time of non-EMVs. Simulation-based experiments indicate that EMVLight enables up to a 42.6% reduction in EMV travel time as well as an 23.5% shorter average travel time compared with existing approaches.

Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 29 of its 123 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2022.

Builds on

29 of 123 references.

References · 29

  1. 2019Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Large-scale Traffic Signal Controlcited by 164
  2. 2019CoLight: Learning Network-level Cooperation for Traffic Signal Controlcited by 138
  3. 2017Stabilising Experience Replay for Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 117
  4. 2019Learning Phase Competition for Traffic Signal Controlcited by 87
  5. 2021SimCVD: Simple Contrastive Voxel-Wise Representation Distillation for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentationcited by 86
  6. 2018CT Super-resolution GAN Constrained by the Identical, Residual, and Cycle Learning Ensemble(GAN-CIRCLE)cited by 82
  7. 2019A Survey on Traffic Signal Control Methodscited by 79
  8. 2021Auto-Encoding Knowledge Graph for Unsupervised Medical Report Generationcited by 47
  9. 2021Self-supervised Contrastive Cross-Modality Representation Learning for Spoken Question Answeringcited by 39
  10. 2022End-to-end Spoken Conversational Question Answering: Task, Dataset and Modelcited by 37
  11. 2021Undistillable: Making A Nasty Teacher That CANNOT teach studentscited by 36
  12. 2020Towards Data Distillation for End-to-end Spoken Conversational Question Answeringcited by 35
17 more
  1. 2020Knowledge Distillation for Improved Accuracy in Spoken Question Answeringcited by 31
  2. 2020Unsupervised Wasserstein Distance Guided Domain Adaptation for 3D Multi-Domain Liver Segmentationcited by 28
  3. 2021Self-supervised Dialogue Learning for Spoken Conversational Question Answeringcited by 28
  4. 2020Contextualized Attention-based Knowledge Transfer for Spoken Conversational Question Answeringcited by 27
  5. 2022Bootstrapping Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Anatomical-aware Contrastive Distillationcited by 27
  6. 2018Structure-sensitive Multi-scale Deep Neural Network for Low-Dose CT Denoisingcited by 22
  7. 2020Adaptive Bi-directional Attention: Exploring Multi-Granularity Representations for Machine Reading Comprehensioncited by 22
  8. 2022Incremental Learning Meets Transfer Learning: Application to Multi-site Prostate MRI Segmentationcited by 22
  9. 2018Low-Dose CT via Deep CNN with Skip Connection and Network in Networkcited by 15
  10. 2021CVLight: Decentralized Learning for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control with Connected Vehiclescited by 11
  11. 2021A Decentralized Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Passage of Emergency Vehiclescited by 9
  12. 2021MEGAN: Memory Enhanced Graph Attention Network for Space-Time Video Super-Resolutioncited by 8
  13. 2018Position weighted backpressure intersection control for urban networkscited by 5
  14. 2022Graph-in-Graph Network for Automatic Gene Ontology Description Generationcited by 5
  15. 2014A Compartmental Model for Traffic Networks and its Dynamical Behaviorcited by 1
  16. 2018Routing for Traffic Networks with Mixed Autonomycited by 1
  17. 2022MPC-Based Emergency Vehicle-Centered Multi-Intersection Traffic Controlcited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 1; 2026: 6.

9 papers.

  1. 2024iLLM-TSC: Integration reinforcement learning and large language model for traffic signal control policy improvementcited by 23
  2. 2023UniTSA: A Universal Reinforcement Learning Framework for V2X Traffic Signal Controlcited by 13
  3. 2026The End of Reward Engineering: How LLMs Are Redefining Multi-Agent Coordinationcited by 3
  4. 2026Human-Centric Traffic Signal Control for Equity: A Multi-Agent Action Branching Deep Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 1
  5. 2025Enhancing Traffic Signal Control through Model-based Reinforcement Learning and Policy Reusecited by 0
  6. 2026Spatio-temporal dual-stage hypergraph MARL for human-centric multimodal corridor traffic signal controlcited by 0
  7. 2026Emergency Preemption Without Online Exploration: A Decision Transformer Approachcited by 0
  8. 2026Distributed Real-Time Vehicle Control for Emergency Vehicle Transit: A Scalable Cooperative Methodcited by 0
  9. 2026PatchSTG: Scalable Spatiotemporal Graph Transformers for Traffic Forecasting on Irregular Sensor Networkscited by 0