RALEIGH, N.C. — A Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University and her assistant professor found a way to help first responders with accident response time.

 

What You Need To Know

  •  Researchers at North Carolina State University developed a complex model to improve how quickly first responders get to car accidents

  •  In computational testing, the model outperformed the existing techniques 

  •  This research can help agencies for long-term planning and on a day-to-day basis

 

Asya Atik and Dr. Leila Hajibabi are hoping their research will improve how quickly first responders, like police and EMTs, can respond to a car accident.

They developed a model that can help authorities figure out where to put first responder infrastructure, and determine which responders are best placed to reach an accident quicker.

The Ph.D. candidate, Atik, said she really wanted to work on something that would make a difference in the community.

“I personally am educated on optimization and engineering tools,” Atik said. “I’m also getting my Ph.D. in transportation systems, so I was looking into emergency response type of fields. I also want to work on something that I know has a value that will help people.”

Atik said during their research, they looked at statistics in the United States and realized quickly there were a lot of traffic accidents happening nationwide. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than five million traffic accidents were reported by police in the United States in 2020; and these accidents led to over 38,000 lives lost.

“It’s important to save lives and of course if there is an accident on the road, you clear the roadway from the accident as quickly as possible to make sure you’re avoiding secondary accounts and maintaining the safety on the roadways,” Hajibabi, assistant professor at NCSU, said.

Through their research, they said shorter response times could help avoid some of these impacts. Using real world data, they developed a model that maximizes the coverage area and minimizes the amount of time it would take to reach accident sites. They factored in things like fleet size, resources available to first responders and dispatching locations.

They said their model did better than existing models in terms of improving response times, regardless of the size of the traffic problem they were responding to. They’re hoping that this work helps inform agencies to make decisions when responding to these emergencies.

To test the model, researchers used data collected by the North Carolina Department of Transportation looking at more than 10,000 traffic incidents that happened in over 10,000 different location in Raleigh.