Optimising emergency routes

Research published in the International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, investigates how optimal routes might be calculated for emergency vehicles responding to a shout.

Jiao Yao, Yaxuan Dai,and Yiling Ni of the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Jin Wang Changsha University of Science and Technology, both in China, and Jing Zhao of Delft University of Technology, in The Netherlands, look at this issue of queing traffic and how it impedes the movement of emergency vehicles.

The team lists the various types of vehicle they are considering: ambulances, natural disaster rescue vehicles, fire trucks, police vehicles, engineering rescue vehicles, municipal repair vehicles, traffic accident vehicle rescue equipment, evacuation vehicles, and emergency rescue vehicles. They point out that drivers of these vehicles cannot judge the optimal route in real-time as a situation develops and normal and additional traffic moves around the road systems they are attempting to circumnavigate.

The team has simulated three major situations that might unfold in an emergency situation and used a computer to devise a way to work out the more optimal routes that would allow the emergency vehicles to reach the scene quicker. In one situation, their approach gives a time saving of 22.2% but in another they can actually half the time in transit. They ultimately come to the conclusion the traffic lights used only in emergencies are essential to allow vehicles to breach the queues safely and reach the emergency in a timely manner.

Yao, J., Dai, Y., Ni, Y., Wang, J. and Zhao, J. (2020) ‘Deep characteristics analysis on travel time of emergency traffic’, Int. J. Computational Science and Engineering, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp.162–169.