Finding the Optimal Route for Emergency Vehicles with Consideration of Road Density Control

To address the problem of balancing emergency response timeliness and system operational stability in emergency route planning under highly saturated road networks, this paper proposes an emergency vehicle routing optimization method considering the effect of road density control. The objective is to achieve a trade-off between travel times of emergency vehicles and regular vehicles. The algorithm optimizes in three stages: (1) generating loop-free candidate routes, (2) implementing targeted density adjustments on bottleneck links within the route and redistributing displaced vehicles to adjacent links, and (3) selecting the optimal scheme via joint indicator comparison. Experiments on the Sioux Falls network show that the proposed method reduces emergency travel time by 49.4% and total travel time of regular vehicles by 4.68% compared with the baseline.