Predicting the Response Time of Emergency Medical Services during Urban Flooding: From Rule-Based to Data-Driven Approach
Publication: Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
ABSTRACT
Flooding is a frequent disaster in urban areas. It disrupts the urban transportation and results in longer response times from emergency public services. The primary approach of predicting the response time in prior studies is to simulate vehicles’ movement on disrupted road networks. However, this approach implicitly assumes free-flow transportation and lacks real incident data for prediction and validation. To test the effectiveness of the simulation-based approach, this study applies the approach to predict the ambulance response time change during flooding events. The result shows that the approach could predict the response time increase due to road disruptions and the routing change, but is weak in modeling more complicated mechanisms, such as congestion, demand surge, and service capacity limits, all of which play a significant role in the expected response time. As a promising future direction, a data-driven approach to overcome the weakness of the rule-based simulation approach is discussed.
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Information
Published In
Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
Pages: 272 - 279
History
Published online: Jan 25, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Business management
- Disaster preparedness
- Disaster response
- Disaster risk management
- Emergency management
- Floods
- Government
- Highway and road management
- Highway transportation
- Highways and roads
- Infrastructure
- Organizations
- Practice and Profession
- Public services
- Public transportation
- Transportation engineering
- Urban and regional development
- Urban areas
- Vehicles
- Water and water resources
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