Defining Routes for Emergency Response from Climate Events: a Data-oriented Approach

Extreme Events have recently become a topic of interest mainly due to the impacts of climate change worldwide over the last years. Such events commonly have a severe impact on major cities. Especially in Brazilian cities, the combination of climate change and unplanned urban growth on steep slopes has led to floods and landslides that killed thousands of people over the past decade. Once an extreme event impacts a city, a series of emergency events (henceforth named e-events) are registered by the citizens (by calling the local emergency telephone number). These e-events may vary from a small flood to a large-scale landslide. Thus, it is a top priority for governments to respond to these e-events as fast and as efficiently as possible. The problem is that the number of e-events is usually larger than the number of people (and vehicles) to respond to them. Another challenge is that these vehicles have to cross an impacted city with major traffic jams. The routes have to consider real-time traffic data to avoid streets with heavy traffic. This article proposes an approach named IRONSTONE, which aims at collecting the topology of the city and real-time traffic data to generate optimized routes for teams to respond to e-events. The proposed approach was evaluated with real scenarios of the city of Niteroi and the results are promising.