Krishnan and iLab researchers Lavanya Marla and Yisong Yue used call and service logs from an emergency services provider in a large Asian city that captured location (urban, rural or tribal), time stamps, type of emergency, type of service required, ambulances assigned to the calls and the travel times experienced by these ambulances in the city. The researchers found that their methods for dynamically redeploying ambulances based on data analytics helped significantly reduce the response time to an emergency, while also decreasing the number of calls not serviced by nearly 50 percent.
The study was done through the Mobility Analytics thrust of the Heinz College’s iLab. Krishnan added that the research findings might be useful in other application contexts such as those being studied by CMU’s Traffic 21 program, which works to design and deploy safer and more economic transportation solutions, and the University Transportation Center, a collaborative effort between CMU and the University of Pennsylvania that will explore cutting-edge technologies that could influence everything from vehicle safety to traffic flow analysis.