Safe Route Determination for First Responders in the Presence of Moving Obstacles

Determining safe and fast routes for first responders is an important issue in a disaster response. Especially when different types of disasters (e.g., toxic plumes, fires, and floods) occur and affect transportation networks simultaneously, special routing strategies (e.g., detour) would be needed to ensure the safety for responders. On the other hand, after disasters happen, a quick response time is required, and the responders should move as fast as possible and even go through certain obstacles to reach the disaster sites to deliver emergency services. In this paper, we study path planning through moving obstacles, taking into account the influence of obstacles on the status of road networks and the speed of rescue vehicles. A set of algorithms is proposed to deal with not only geometries but also the properties of moving obstacles to support route generation. Based on the Dijkstra algorithm, a new routing algorithm is designed and developed, which aims at minimizing the risk while constraining the travel time of routes. We validate our approach with a set of experiments on some navigation cases. The experimental results show the promise of the algorithm in the generation of feasible and safe routes for first responders to pass through moving obstacles.