Risk-minimal routes for emergency cars

The computation of an optimal route for given start and destination in a static transportation network is used in many applications of private route planning. In this work we focus on route planning for emergency cars, such as for example police, fire brigade and ambulance. In case of private route planning typical quantities to be minimized are travel time or route length. However, the idea of this paper is to minimize the risk of a travel time exceeding a certain limit. This is inspired by the fact that the emergency cars have to reach the destination within a legal time. We consider mainly two approaches. The first approach takes into account relevant information to determine the weight, i.e. the desirability of certain edges of a graph during the minimization procedure. One possible risk factor to be aware of would be a suddenly jammed single-lane road on which the emergency car has no chance to make use of the benefits of the siren for instance. The same holds for full-closure situations and railroad crossings. We present a catalogue of risk factors along with an appropriate algorithm for practical route planning in emergency situations. The second one takes into account a weekly updated set of probe-vehicle data for each minute of the week along with data of current travel times. Comparing those travel-time data allows calculation of the associated risk for traveling certain edges of a route in a road network. We expect our algorithm to be a major advancement especially for destinations that lie outside the typical region travelled weekdays. In this case the automatic route planning naturally goes along with an additional gain of time

Physiology-Aware Rural Ambulance Routing

In emergency patient transport from rural medical facility to center tertiary hospital, real-time monitoring of the patient in the ambulance by a physician expert at the tertiary center is crucial. While telemetry healthcare services using mobile networks may enable remote real-time monitoring of transported patients, physiologic measures and tracking are at least as important and requires the existence of high-fidelity communication coverage. However, the wireless networks along the roads especially in rural areas can range from 4G to low-speed 2G, some parts with communication breakage. From a patient care perspective, transport during critical illness can make route selection patient state dependent. Prompt decisions with the relative advantage of a longer more secure bandwidth route versus a shorter, more rapid transport route but with less secure bandwidth must be made. The trade-off between route selection and the quality of wireless communication is an important optimization problem which unfortunately has remained unaddressed by prior work. In this paper, we propose a novel physiology-aware route scheduling approach for emergency ambulance transport of rural patients with acute, high risk diseases in need of continuous remote monitoring. We mathematically model the problem into an NP-hard graph theory problem, and approximate a solution based on a trade-off between communication coverage and shortest path. We profile communication along two major routes in a large rural hospital settings in Illinois, and use the traces to manifest the concept. Further, we design our algorithms and run preliminary experiments for scalability analysis. We believe that our scheduling techniques can become a compelling aid that enables an always-connected remote monitoring system in emergency patient transfer scenarios aimed to prevent morbidity and mortality with early diagnosis treatment.Comment: 6 pages, The Fifth IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2017), Park City, Utah, 201

Review of Erosion and Sedimentation Control Programs in the Piscataqua Region

The Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership (PREP) seeks to minimize adverse impacts to water resources associated with construction site development activities. In order to achieve this goal, PREP must understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing erosion and sedimentation control (E&SC) programs in the 52 municipalities of the PREP water shed (Figure 1-1). A detailed understanding of the existing E&SC programs will enable PREP and other stakeholders to identify and implement actions to improve E&SC programs and minimize adverse impacts. This report provides a review and assessment of existing erosion and sedimentation control programs and a set of recommendations for improving these programs. Our approach in conducting the review was to obtain available federal, state and municipal programs data and to interview people who work with E&SC programs on a daily basis, including state, municipal, construction contractor and site inspector staff. A statement of the problem, an introduction to applicable regulations, and a description of our project approach are provided below

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future