Abstract
Congestion constitutes a major problem in modern urban traffic networks if not well managed. Its monstrous effects, on occasions, can paralyze a traffic network eating deep into the productive hours of commuters as well as vehicles and persons on essential services. Particularly affected are incidence-intervention vehicles such as emergency vehicles and fire-fighting vehicles. Whatever the cause of the congestion, its effect is counter-productive and an indication of an inefficient traffic network. This work, as presented in this paper, is concerned about the issue of traffic route management for emergency service (emergency vehicle) for which a delay of few minutes may cause tremendous loss of lives and properties. The route management scheme built for this purpose integrates information obtained from the use of Radio Frequency Signals for Traffic Light Preemption at Intersections in a Proteus Simulator environment and the use Arc GIS as a mode of routing the emergency vehicle from base to the incidence location, then to Health Facilities and from thence back to the emergency vehicle base in an optimal routing time. Traffic information are loaded into the Arc GIS environment which predicts the required tri-legged optimal routing and its duration using Dijkstra’s algorithm. Different scenarios of emergency vehicle, incidence and health facility locations were exploited using the scheme and compared with situations without their implementation. The proposed scheme outperforms the trial and error routing of emergency vehicles and can be embedded into traffic advisory system or as stand-alone emergency vehicle management system. Keywords: GIS, Dijkstra’s algorithm, Facility Location, Emergency-Vehicle, Optimal Routing
Highlights
With the increase of city size, emergency rescue system is playing an important role in the safety of human life and social security
The work presented here integrates optimal location of emergency vehicle base within predetermined service area, optimal routing based on closest service area of incidence and traffic signal preemption in a Proteus Simulator environment, using Arc Geospatial information system (GIS) to route from the emergency vehicle base to the incidence spot to a health facility
Concerns of dynamic vehicle routing in traffic network include routing based on the dynamics of goods routed (Goel and Gruhn, 2008; Gribkovskaia et al, 2008; Hvattum et al, 2007), services (Beaudry et al 2010 and Thomas, 2007), travel times (Tagmouti et al, 2011; Gholami-Zanjani et al, 2018 and Tlili et al, 2017) and vehicle availability (Ghadiri and Banar, 2018 and Aringhieri et al, 2017)
Summary
With the increase of city size, emergency rescue system is playing an important role in the safety of human life and social security. There is a positive connection between the delay of emergency vehicles and ratio of fatal or serious preventable incidences These untoward losses can be minimized by deploying intelligent decision system and shortest path algorithms to optimize ambulance travel time to and from accidents scene to the nearest hospitals. The work reported that the system responds intelligently to variable traffic conditions on the road and decisions to improve traffic flow were made. It uses an in-vehicle remote controller that can override the proximate intersection signal timing system’s time distributions in order to give priority to emergency vehicles. Geospatial information system (GIS) in emergency vehicles routing offers a worthy tool for network analysis visualization and management
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have