Path planning for first responders in the presence of moving obstacles

Abstract

Navigation services have gained much importance for all kinds of human activities ranging from tourist navigation to support of rescue teams in disaster management. However, despite the considerable amount of route guidance research that has been performed, many issues that are related to navigation for first responders still need to be addressed. During disasters, emergencies can result in different types of moving obstacles (e.g., fires, plumes, floods), which make some parts of the road network temporarily unavailable. After such incidents occur, responders have to go to different destinations to perform their tasks in the environment affected by the disaster. Therefore they need a path planner that is capable of dealing with such moving obstacles, as well as generating and coordinating their routes quickly and efficiently. During the past decades, more and more hazard simulations, which can modify the models with incorporation of dynamic data from the field, have been developed. These hazard simulations use methods such as data assimilation, stochastic estimation, and adaptive measurement techniques, and are able to generate more reliable results of hazards. This would allow the hazard simulation models to provide valuable information regarding the state of road networks affected by hazards, which supports path planning for first responders among the moving obstacles. The objective of this research is to develop an integrated navigation system for first responders in the presence of moving obstacles. Such system should be able to navigate one or more responders to one or multiple destinations avoiding the moving obstacles, using the predicted information of the moving obstacles generated from by hazard simulations. In this dissertation, the objective we have is expressed as the following research question: "How do we safely and efficiently navigate one or more first responders to one or more destinations avoiding moving obstacles?" To address the above research questions, this research has been conducted using the following outline: 1). literature review; 2). conceptual design and analysis; 3). implementation of the prototype; and 4). assessment of the prototype and adaption. We investigated previous research related to navigation in disasters, and designed an integrated navigation system architecture, assisting responders in spatial data storage, processing and analysis. Within this architecture, we employ hazard models to provide the predicted information about the obstacles, and select a geo-database to store the data needed for emergency navigation. Throughout the development of the prototype navigation system, we have proposed: 1). a multi-agent system, which supports the spatial data processing and analysis involved in the routing process; 2). algorithms for path planning in the presence of moving obstacles; 3). spatial data models, which structure the disaster-related information for routing. We have implemented a prototype of multi-agent based navigation system, and applied it to different navigation cases. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of our system in providing safe routes for responders, and show the potential for a wider range of applications.