Towards a new approach for navigation and management of emergency response activities in large-scale urban areas

Emergency response is one of the important phases in emergency management which requires fast and efficient planning in order to save peoples life’s in a limited time. Organizations involved in emergency planning and response need specific resources in order to manage disasters. Amongst several important resources, there is a need of fast and efficient algorithms in order to process data and provide guidance to decision-makers in emergency response. Navigation and path finding algorithms are especially needed, since they provide guidance on how to reach specific destinations by means of efficient costs (e.g. time, distance, etc.). However, current algorithms for navigation have some disadvantages which make them un-suitable for emergency response applications, especially in big cities. In this paper we introduce a particular navigation problem tied to emergency response activities which occurs in big cities. We also provide the advantages and disadvantages of current state-of-theart navigation algorithms, and present our novel idea for combining Dijkstra algorithm with Space Filling Curves (SFCs) in order to develop an efficient and fast navigation algorithm for the emergency response application domain.

Keywords:

Emergency response , Navigation , Dijkstra algorithm , Space Filling Curves