A study of situationally aware routing for emergency responders

Abstract

This paper presents tests conducted on routes determined from a Dijkstra-based shortest path problem and a Variance-Constrained Shortest Path problem under varying conditions of traffic and weather in a simulated ‘smart environment’. Utilizing envisioned future advanced transportation systems’ real-time information on traffic parameters allows data fusion techniques to provide situation awareness to its users. Taking advantage of this real-time data, the routing methodologies and data capture techniques studied in this paper provides Emergency Medical Services with better routes when responding to a vehicular crash. Comparing the performance of both routing methodologies in terms of both their ability to provide better routes as well as computation times demonstrates two alternatives for aiding in future emergency response.

Keywords:

• routing
• emergency response
• data fusion

Supplementary information accompanies the paper on Journal of the Operational Research Society website (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors)

Supplementary information accompanies the paper on Journal of the Operational Research Society website (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors)

Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided us with excellent advice and guidance in order to strengthen and improve our paper. This material is based upon work supported by the Federal Highway Administration under Cooperative Agreement No. DTFH61-07-H-00023, awarded to the Center for Transportation Injury Research, CUBRC, Inc., Buffalo, NY. Any opinions, findings and conclusions are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Federal Highway Administration.