Efficient Path Planning for Emergency Medical Services With Stable Connectivity Demands
Wen-Pin Liu, Xuan-Zhang Hu, Van-Linh Nguyen, Lan-Huong Nguyen, Ren‐Hung Hwang · 2024
Currently, online map navigation applications are essential to our daily demands, such as route finding in a big city or booking a taxi trip. Further, the applications also play a pivotal role in finding access to the nearest medical aid in big cities with complex traffic networks. However, existing commercial map programs are unable to provide route suggestions in areas where a continuous network connection is assured, which is essential for distant emergency medical services. This study introduces a highly effective personalized shortest-path algorithm for finding the fastest path of an emergency vehicle (EV) while also ensuring stable network connections for potential remote robotic surgery. By using a customized A-star algorithm, the experimental findings demonstrate that this technique can outperform current search approaches with a 5% shorter path length per 5km. For rescue missions in a large city, the enhancement is remarkable and has the potential to save lives. Due to high compatibility with the existing search algorithms, this method can easily be included as a critical feature for existing commercial map apps.