RescueRoute: Using Real-Time Traffic Data for Routing Emergency Vehicles

Current evidence tends to indicate that real-time traffic (RTT) data is not currently used in emergency vehicle routing, even though it can be crucial for route planning and thus for saving lives. In this paper, we present our RescueRoute application for routing emergency vehicles to the emergency scene using RTT data. The responsibilities within the application are split into three components, i.e., (1) a mobile component (MC) to display routes on a mobile device in an ambulance, (2) a dispatcher component (DC) to list emergency vehicles and emergencies, display route options, and dispatch emergency vehicles, and (3) a back end component (BE) for combining map data and RTT data into optimized routes regarding travel time. We identify and evaluate currently available sources of RTT data and demonstrate that our prototype provides solid results using OpenStreetMap for map data and TomTom API for RTT data. We believe that these preliminary results are encouraging and pave the way for a broader experimental campaign to introduce the use of RTT data for emergency service routing.