One more feature that can be added to the system is making an option of updating the system about the accidents that might occur in any street with the help of police stations. An automatic weight and travel time cost could also be calculated in order to find the fastest route which will assist in navigation. This system shows that ambulance drivers’ knowledge can be used to build an intelligent routing system using GIS. This system helps to remove the errors caused by the stress induced time constraint decisions by the ambulance drivers because it does not rely on expensive real time data sensors.
For this research, inputs were taken from the interaction with various experienced ambulance drivers which were taken as the main source of knowledge acquisition and the literature available was used as a secondary source. These knowledge sources helped to collect the appropriate criteria by which a particular route is taken as the first choice rather than the other. Depending on times and places some more rules were integrated in to the system. For instance, certain roads are seen to be congested at specific times.
A particular example is that all the roads, nearly up to 200 meter, remain congested during the hours of entry and exit. One more instance where roads got congested for a particular period of time was the football match in Leicester City Football Club on 7th of March, where for about 500 metres zone around the stadium the roads got congested after the match. The streets are assigned weights based on the criteria that affect the speed of the vehicle like number of lanes, traffic lights presence of restricted area such as schools etc.
Then the weighted travel along each road is calculated by multiplying the travel time cost to the weights. The fastest route between an incident location and the hospital location is then calculated using ArcView’s Network Analyst. This knowledge based system would be more convenient if it is built in C++ programming language which would be easily integrated into ArcView operating The ease would be especially more when applying time rules by updating the fastest route according to the system timing such as PDA timing. Resources Abler, E. (1992), Everything in Its Place: GPS, GIs, and Geography in the 1990s.
A paper presented in the special session “New Directions in Medical Geography” at the inaugural joint conference of the New Zealand Geographical Society and the Institute of Australian Geographers, University of Auckland: 45(2) 1993, pages 139-147. Aurangabadkar, R. , Eswara Prasanna Rao, P, and Singh, S, (2007), Spatial information system for medical services in Chennai City, India. Conference, Hyderabad, India. Balke, N. , Charara, H. and Parker, R. (2005) Measuring performance of traffic signal systems using existing detector technology. Texas Transportation, Institute, the Texas A&M University System. http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/commuter/cbtf/faq.htm