Travel Time Forecasting and Dynamic Routes Design for Emergency Vehicles

A framework to dynamically design routes of emergency vehicles taking into account within-day variations of link travel times on a road network is presented. The framework integrates two modelling components: (i) a within-day dynamic assignment model that simulates the interaction between the time-varying network and travel demand, and (ii) a dynamic vehicle routing model that design optimal routes of emergency vehicles. The linking variable of the two modelling components is the short-term forecasted travel time, which allows to design routes of emergency vehicles based on anticipatory knowledge of traffic dynamics on the road network. Some procedures of the proposed framework are calibrated and validated in an experimental evacuation test site. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.