Using Traffic Information in Operations Analysis for Response of Emergency Services

The Singapore Traffic Information Platform (TRIP) was developed in 2008 under a technical collaboration between the Land Transport Authority of Singapore (LTA) and Quantum Inventions (QI) to provide consumers, enterprises and system vendors with real-time traffic information that could be directly used for dynamic route guidance applications. Since its deployment in 2009, the outputs from TRIP have been used to power various traffic information services for consumers, including a real-time RDS-TMC service. More recently, traffic intelligence applications have been developed and deployed to use the processed traffic information from TRIP for operations and planning. In this paper, the authors present details of a project in which statistical traffic data profiles were used to model travel times from emergency response locations to incidents (e.g. an accident) at different times of day. The system uses nine statistical profiles along with a models-based routing system to estimate the travel time and distance that an emergency vehicle would need to travel. In this paper, they discuss the process of creating the traffic profiles along with the special rules that were implemented to cater to the specific traveling patterns of emergency vehicles (e.g., they can use road shoulders, they get priority on the roads). The authors will discuss some of the analyses that were performed based on simulated locations of incidents and calculated response times from different locations. They also include information about the accuracy of the model, as estimated using historical records. Finally, they highlight the key challenges faced.