Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1155/dsn/5552310

Publication Title

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Volume

2025

Issue

1

Pages

5552310 (1-21)

Abstract

Traditionally, traffic incident management (TIM) programs coordinate the deployment of emergency resources to immediate incident requests without accommodating the interdependencies on incident evolutions in the environment. However, ignoring these inherent interdependencies while making current deployment decisions is shortsighted, and the resulting naive deployment strategy can significantly worsen the overall incident delay impact on the network. The interdependencies on incident evolution in the environment, including those between incident occurrences and those between resource availability in near-future requests and the anticipated duration of the immediate incident request, should be considered through a look-ahead model when making current-stage deployment decisions. This study develops a new proactive framework based on the distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP) to address the above limitations, overcoming conventional TIM models that cannot accommodate the dependencies in the TIM problem. Furthermore, the optimization objective is formulated to incorporate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs’ role in TIM includes exploring uncertain traffic conditions, detecting unexpected events, and augmenting information from roadway traffic sensors. Robustness analysis of our model for multiple TIM scenarios shows satisfactory performance using local search exploration heuristics. Overall, our model reports a significant reduction in total incident delay compared to conventional TIM models. With UAV support, we demonstrate a further decrease in the total incident delay ranging between 5% and 45% for the different number of incidents. UAVs’ active sensing can shorten response time of emergency vehicles and reduce uncertainties associated with the estimated incident delay impact.

Rights

© 2025 Justice Darko and Hyoshin Park.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "The data utilized in this study were generated through simulations designed specifically for the presented research. Detailed descriptions of the simulation setup, scenarios, and experimental parameters are provided in the “Scenarios and Experiment” section of the article."

ORCID

0000-0002-1490-5404 (Park)

Original Publication Citation

Darko, J., & Park, H. (2025). Proactive distributed emergency response with heterogeneous tasks allocation. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2025(1), 1-21, Article 5552310. https://doi.org/10.1155/dsn/5552310

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