Abstract
When accidents or disasters happen, emergency response time is always crucial. Most procedures in the existing emergency vehicle dispatching systems rely heavily on manual assignments. In this paper, we propose a novel emergency vehicle dispatching system to reduce emergency response time, which includes automatic emergency resource assignment and driving path planning to reduce unnecessary time delay caused by human misjudgement or the delay caused by traffic jam. As the traffic condition varies from time to time, the traffic information employed in the proposed method needs to trace back to several weeks prior to the dispatching time. Furthermore, we also propose a lane reservation scheme for emergency vehicles to minimize the crash risks. Before an emergency vehicle arrives at each road segment, Road Side Units start to disseminate the warning message at suitable time, so that other drivers could have enough time to take proper actions such as speed acceleration or switching lanes. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can largely reduce the traveling time of emergency vehicles comparing to the shortest path approach with sirens and lights to alert other drivers. With the traveling time as well as emergency resource assignment time being reduced, the emergency rescue teams would gain edges in rescuing lives and property.