Improving Emergency Vehicle Routing with Additional Road Features

Routing decisions affect everybody traveling on the roadways, but perhaps those decisions are never more important than for emergency responders. In a field where seconds count, getting lost or taking a sub-optimal route can mean the difference between life and death. Routing methods have advanced from hand drawn maps to smart phones with dynamic routing using GPS, and new data science methods can improve it further. This paper employs a modification to a common routing algorithm to improve route decision for emergency responders. By considering roadway geometry and connected vehicle technologies that simple routing algorithms ignore, Dijkstra’s algorithm was able to be customized specifically for emergency response. The lane count, intersection control devices, and median construction were three additional elements of data incorporated into the modified model. Through a case study of an area of Albemarle County, Virginia, USA and discussion with domain experts, this paper demonstrates the feasibility and potential benefits of using such an algorithm to improve routing decisions for emergency responders.