Dispatching and Routing of Emergency Vehicles in Disaster Mitigation using Data Fusion ⋆

The aim is to develop a robust methodology for dispatching and routing of emergency vehicles (EVs) in a post-disaster environment with the support of data fusion for decision-making. In this work we consider an earthquake scenario with a large number of casualties needing medical attention. With the influx of information (about the casualties, road and traffic conditions, etc.) data is fused to give estimates about the entities under consideration. We use this information to dispatch and route ambulances to casualty pick-up locations and then delivery to appropriate hospitals. The key factors that affect the dispatching of ambulances to a patient location include− patient priority, cluster information, and distance. Similarly, those affecting the dispatching of ambulances from a patient location to a hospital include− waiting time estimates at hospital emergency rooms, hospital capacities, and distance. Routes need to be generated for these ambulances taking into account the large scale of the real-world road network in addition to road damages, congestion and other such factors effecting routing. We present a dispatching and routing simulation model and a case study to show the performance of the developed methods.